Comment by BeetleB
5 years ago
> One is that it encourages the writer to focus upon the logical structure of documents, rather than the formatting. This is useful when preparing an articles or books for publication (when the publisher supports or accepts LaTeX)
This is the theory, but almost never been my experience. When I wrote for journals, and for my thesis, it was never the case where I could just use their style files and put in the content and the formatting would work out. Not even close. I always had to fiddle with formatting to get it to be good enough for the journal.
You are, of course, correct. I went down that road when hired to edit the LaTeX of a book for publication. Yet I also look at it as a case of LaTeX encouraging documents to be logically structured in the writing phase and doing the actual formatting later. It is, after all, a cumbersome process that is best handled when the text is ready. (Granted, that may be specific to the circumstances in which I used LaTeX.)