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Whether to use LaTeX

LaTeX (or TeX) may be ``overkill'' if you've never used it and are only producing a newspaper or a novel or a slick advertisement or a letter to Aunt Henrietta. That can be done with Word or Quark or FrameMaker etc.

On the other hand, for those who need the capabilities of TeX for production of books and journal articles in research mathematics, no other current composition tool (proprietary or otherwise) can handle the material and produce high-quality, publication-worthy output, and simultaneously be usable by the writer of the document. The TeX folks would be glad to provide test material to anyone who wants to prove this wrong. (It hasn't happened yet; the audience is much too small, and the problem too complex for a Microsoft or Quark or Adobe to be interested.)

Furthermore, there are some wonderful freeware implementations of LaTeX, especially TeXShop for Macintosh. While not WYSIWYG, only a single button-click in the TeXShop LaTeX source editing window is needed to compile and display the document in PDF form. It can't get much simpler!

You may wish to use LaTeX for any of these reasons:

Your document has a lot of mathematical formulae
Your computer doesn't have Word, or FrameMaker, or other proprietary $oftware
You are happier using a text editor (like emacs or vi or pico)
You want to concentrate on the (text) content of the document and let the computer handle formatting details.
Your document has a lot of chapters or sections you'd like to keep in separate files
You want to understand the \TeX macros used around the world for mathematical notation
You want to use existing BibTeX bibliographic databases
You want to use software available for free on every computer platform
You need to insert PostScript figures

You may wish to stick with Microsoft Word for any of these reasons:

You want a ``WYSIWYG'' editor (What You See Is What You Get) and you don't have LyX (for Unix systems)
Your document will only be used among folks who have MS Word
Your document contains no formulae, or fairly simple formulae
Your document contains formulae but you're not fussy about how they look (see below)

Compare the following two sets of formulae produced by Word (Equation Editor) and by TeX, respectively. If the difference doesn't matter to you or your publisher, then you might not need LaTeX.

1a. TeX version
1b. Word version

2a.
TeX

2b.
Word

Another link: Why LaTeX?