It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine. LaTeX is really good at getting documents that look 90% as good as an actual typesetter could make them look, if one can live with somewhat conservative looking documents. The last 10 percent, fixing margin width, changing paragraphs and so on, are incredibly hard with LaTeX. (Of course LaTeX defaults are a lot better than word, largely because LaTeX automatically uses consistent headers instead of sometime 15 pt and sometimes 16 pt underlined.)
I get your point, but you're really exaggerating the difficulty of changing margins, paragraph spacing, and similar things. It's easy with straight LaTeX, and even easier with the "geometry" package.
Yes, to address to criticisms of your comments and siblings, in my experience if you start changing fonts, then you need to change margins and paragraph spacing, and down the rabbit hole you go. The thing is, a small change is not very complicated, but the defaults are also really good. So if you just want to get below a certain page limit, then it is easy to change the margin. If you start to wanting to improve the overall look of the document, then it is usually a much better idea to play with different packages were someone else already did the hard work instead of trying to improve details by yourself.
For at least 5 of that last 10% I'd recommend \usepackage{microtype}
But yeah, fighting LaTeX is a pain. I thought I'd just install a font (hack). A month later I decided well maybe just using another font (inconsolata) is good enough.
> It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine.
Fully agreed.
> The last 10 percent, fixing margin width
If you're talking about page margins, the `geometry` package makes that easy.
Luckily, sometimes you get into scenarios where somebody has done the hard part for you. For example when writing journal articles, some journals have document classes published that you just have to use, and not do anything special in the body.
Yes, but there are 500 'features' in Word which are almost always really stupid ideas, an experienced graphics designer knows how to use them, 99% of Word users don't. In LaTeX you have to work to do something really stupid.
