I know that workflow style is good for like dissertations and academic journal articles, but the sort of templates I have to design and work in are more splashy and dramatic. The look and structure is more akin to what you see in artsy magazines and books—pages with dark background colors, decorative stock images, vector shapes, etc. Can Latex be used for that?
I consider myself a Word power user. I’ve spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I’ve designed professional corporate template suites in it.
I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again.
It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can’t delete if you don’t need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are “font themes” which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them.
I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren’t much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamental level.
I actually like the ribbon UI compared to what came before. Jensen Harris from the office design team way back in 2008 gave this talk about how they invented the ribbon:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4