Latex is really good if someone needs lots of math, references and so on. It's really par none when it comes to technical writing. But it's so clunky in some ways it's more of a precision tool for this particular task than a generic layout software. I'm saying this as person who's in his past lives written scientific material using LaTeX and done semi-professional graphic design and layout work as well.
Oh god, I in my time tried to tweak LaTeX so I could reach the same aesthetics as using InDesign. While doable (I'm sure) - it's not really worth an effort. LaTeX and it's ways of working are very specific to that one context. it's the Torx screwdriver for the torx screws of technical and scientific publishing. But lot of layout stuff needs a philips head, a nail and a hammer and so on. While a torx screwdriver surely can be used to pound nails, I would not suggest it as an efficient tool.
Don't feed the LaTeX fetish. Some people like to do everything with it, just like people like doing lots of odd things that bring particular aesthetic joy to them, that would be completely impractical or intolerable to others.
LaTeX in a non-technical or non-scientific context is an eccentric quirk. I love eccentric quirks and people who have them! I have many myself! But I would not push my quirks to other people in any setting.
There's a lot more to LaTeX than just equations though. There are packages for handling lots of things the humanities need too. Egyptian Hieroglyphs? Use HieroTeX. Music? Use Musixtex. Really, think of anything that would be hard to typeset manually and somebody's likely to have already created a LaTeX package for it.
I did that and i didn’t like latex.
Especially error messages in case of wrong latex code was extremely unhelpful, pointing to code lines far away from the actual erroneous line.
I might be too stupid... but that’s how it felt, and i imagine being able to use simple markdown much more useable.
Everyone always recommends latex, but I always end up spending more time googling cryptic errors that actually writing when using latex. I would not recommend it to a friend.
Because there is more to a book than type-setting and anything like putting images where you want them or specific whitespace aesthetics is a major pain to do in LaTex.
What's so painful about whitespace in LaTeX? hspace is horizontal space. vspace is vertical space. I mean, you should use smallskip, bigskip, etc., but if you want specific length, hspace/vspace work.
