John Andersen
Latex is more about typesetting than writing,
You have the wrong impression of LaTeX. The whole point of LaTeX is that the author should not have to worry about formatting/typesetting once the class of the document is defined.
and its aimed mostly at technical/scientific writing. It would be a huge distraction to go down that path.
No. LaTeX is meant for documents that does not require precise layout (like an ad). It is definitely a good tool for a novel. A good class to use is "memoir": http://ctan.org/pkg/memoir
Outlining is something I use as well, and sadly its pretty much missing/useless in OOo and Libre Office.
The only good outliner is org-mode (outlining is only part of what it does) in Emacs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode http://orgmode.org/manual/index.html However, it has a very steep learning curve. Charles -- "Whip me. Beat me. Make me maintain AIX." (By Stephan Zielinski)