[…] the other hand, Luke Maciak at Terminally Incoherent said clients would count spaces in Word documents and send them… Needless to say, he hated these […]

It is the closest you can get to professional typesetting without actually paying for it.

Nothing wrong with paying a professional for quality services… We are talking about typesetting still?

typing with rubber gloves on of course.

Latex :D You know… the stuff I paint on when i am about to go to the beach.

LOL! What were you thinking about? 8O

Oh LaTex… like the program ;) I was thinking something diffrent.

LaTex pretty much does everything – it does kerning, text alignment, it figures out how to break long lines (ie if I have a really long string with no spaces, it will cut it in a convenient space according to grammatical rules), put the figures in good places, enumerate your bibliography and etc.

It is the closest you can get to professional typesetting without actually paying for it. :)

Its not just stretching the space after the period, its doing the column style text thingy(I’m sure there’s a better name for that)so I don’t know how conclusive that is.

lol, you can almost say LaTex … streches… what word processing can do.
LaTex makes writing a … SNAP.

Just to illustrate a point here I created two identical documents and I pasted the same exact Lorem Ipsum text into them. In word I had to indent the paragraphs and added the page number and then converted it into a PDF file using PDF Writer. In LaTex I didn’t do anything.

Please note the spacing after the period. I haven’t measured it, but there is a striking difference between how Word and LaTex handle the end of the sentence. I haven’t measured it, but I’m willing to bet that in the LaTex sample the space between sentences is actually 2 or at least 1.5 times bigger than a standard space.

In other words, Word is crappy to begin with.

Check these out: [LaTex Sample] and [Word Sample] (both are PDF files).