David Freeman wrote:
For most people they spend to much time fiddling with presentation in word, using LaTeX speeds up the work no end as you type the text in and simply mark it up as to how it should be, saved me hours on my college work!
I think it should not be underestimated how much effect how something looks has on the reader. I would suggest that it is for this reason that much SPAM is sent in HTML only - because those sending it conceive it with colour and graphics and can't imagine what it would look like otherwise.
That said, I concur with David that divorcing thinking about presentation from thinking about content can speed document writing. My recent experience with XML bore this out - it took a whole evening of fiddling about to get the two style sheets just as I wanted them, but writing the documents is now much faster than it was - I naturally think of the document in terms of what the paragraph I'm writing means rather than what font it should be displayed in etc.
Even when using a WYSIWYG word processor one would be well advised to make maximum use of stylesheets though some wordprocessors could make these a little easier to use.
Steve.