Do note that LuaLaTeX (allowing the native use of Lua), the successor of pdfLaTeX and LaTeX3 are in active development.
To the best of my knowledge no other program can easily break, for example, wrongly placed ligatures.
In LuaLaTeX you just have to enter \usepackage{selnolig} and you’re done.
The microtypography of LaTeX (note that \usepackage{microtype} should always be used) is also unmatched, the last comparisons I know of with Adobe InDesign were quite striking:
http://www.zinktypografie.nl/latex.php?lang=en
LuaLaTeX in combination with fontspec allows also the easy use of system otf fonts, so it surely is not “dead”.

@ Rob:

Been a steady LaTeX user for a decade? Think you’re okay at it? Write a resumé template from scratch. I don’t know anyone in my department who could do that in less than a day.

I did this very recently, actually. Although you are right in that it took me longer than a day, overall it wasn’t that painful or that much longer, and I’ve only been using LaTeX for about a year.

I know this is an old post, google sent me to here. I want to learn how to use LaTex, but my boss will shoot me to dead if I give him a paper written in LaTex. The world of Windows XP(piracy) and Windows office 2003(piracy) is the only world my boss wants to stay with.

Thank you for the clear comparison and the objective opinion, I believe that Microsoft word is better than LaTEX when it comes to writing simple documents with graphics. And when writing technical documents such software and IT documentation. I think LaTEX is better for research houses and mathematical documents. Anyway I did an analysis about LaTEX and Microsoft Word for IT organization please have a look on it : http://www.jaftalks.com/wp/index.php/latex-or-microsoft-word-in-it-org anization/
I will be waiting for your opinion, kindly post your agreement in the comment.
Thank you

Thanks for your post.
I’m just twinking the layout, and notice the discussion here.

My reasons:
Personally, I like latex because that as I know and trust latex will give me a beautiful document, I can always totally focus on the containt part when I’m writing a paper or some thing. (Sometimes we do need to change de default layout of some template class, and it takes times, but it’s rewarding.)

And YES it takes much time to write a template class for MOST people.
But on the other side, think about how we fall into the group of “most people”?

Recently I rewrote the “inline-math-completion” and updated my fork of Latex-box, a vim plugin for latex writing.

It takes me 3-4 nights. But when I finished it, I notice that I just typed one huandred of lines in total at most. How comes that I spent so much time!
Because I’m not farmilar with the buildin functions and regex, and what’s worse is that I did not ever think I should remember the ones I met (though I like Vim, and have been using it for 3 years).
And I think that’s the difference between me and other plugin authors!

Then I tell meself that I should try to prevent such situations for the things that I really care about in my life. Remember things and familar with tools that can make a big difference.
To become professional, start from remembering.

Hongying

PS: Derek Silvers’ ideas of remembering things with Anki.

@ Victor:
Hi,

Right, It’s a pain to type CJK characters, but just for pdfLatex or LaTex, please try xelatex .

Actually, it’s XeLaTeX does what you say in your quesion “Why can’t LaTeX use the Chinese fonts which have already been installed in the operating system?”

Try to put the following in your “test.tex”, and compile it by
xelatex test.tex

Hongying

The only thing that I disalike is that it isn’t easy to type CJK characters in LaTeX. Well, I am Chinese and I need to type Chinese articles. It doesn’t supported CJK by native, so I have to install CJK for LaTeX, which is such a hard job that waste a lot of time. Why doesn’t LaTeX support all encodings by native? What’s worse, installing CJK for LaTeX is not enough! I need to install special Chinese fonts for LaTeX even if the operating system has already been installed Chinese fonts. This is very strange. Why can’t LaTeX use the Chinese fonts which have already been installed in the operating system?

@ Dave:

Thanks. You can always email me or send me a direct message on Twitter, G+ or Facebook message. My contact info is listed here.

Dude, how do we tell you about typo’s in your articles? They are usually very good and I read them everyday, there are usually however a few spelling or grammer errors. If you don’t care about them then thats fine, but if you would like to correct them then should we post about it in the comments (which seems pointless as once you have fixed the mistake then there is still a comment about it, or will you delete the comment?)

That being said, there is an issue with the first paragraph in the section titled “No Vendor Lock In”. The word “attacked” should be “attached”, isnt it?

Did you notice how most web site about LaTex praise the quality of the printed material with LaTex while having little care of how good looking is the web site itself ?
(and i’m not talking about this blog)
That always puzzled me