John Andersen <jsamyth@gmail.com> writes:
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation.
You mean TeX. LaTeX is simply a set of macros to make the production of documents easier. There are other newer systems available, for example, XeTeX.
LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.
I never said that it wasn't. However, it is not limited to scientific documents- just because the system is good for typesetting maths does not make it less useful for anything else. The behaviour of LaTeX changes in accordance with the document class used and new/user defined document classes are created everyday. The reason why Knuth wrote TeX is because of the poor quality of Phototypesetting system used for his book: ,----[ From http://www.tug.org/whatis.html ] | In the late 1970s, Donald Knuth was revising the second volume of his | multivolume magnum opus The Art of Computer Programming, got the | galleys, looked at them, and said (approximately) "blecch"! He had just | received his first samples from the new typesetting system of the | publisher's, and its quality was so far below that of the first edition | of Volume 2 that he couldn't stand it. Around the same time, he saw a | new book by Patrick Winston that had been produced digitally, and | ultimately realized that typesetting meant arranging 0's and 1's (ink | and no ink) in the proper pattern, and said (approximately), "As a | computer scientist, I really identify with patterns of 0's and 1's; I | ought to be able to do something about this", so he set out to learn | what were the traditional rules for typesetting math, what constituted | good typography, and (because the fonts of symbols that he needed really | didn't exist) as much as he could about type design. He figured this | would take about 6 months. (Ultimately, it took nearly 10 years, but | along the way he had lots of help from some people who are well known to | many readers here—Hermann Zapf, Chuck Bigelow, Kris Holmes, Matthew | Carter and Richard Southall are acknowledged in the introduction to | Volume E, Computer Modern Typefaces, of the Addison-Wesley Computers & | Typesetting book series.) `---- Charles -- "Problem solving under linux has never been the circus that it is under AIX." (By Pete Ehlke in comp.unix.aix)