Although LaTeX typesets beautiful documents, using it is frankly a pain as it takes far longer to typeset a document in LaTeX than in Word or OOo Writer. You arguably have more flexibility in LaTeX, but its nature to typeset using its own sort of syntax makes documents take significantly longer to write.
And I don't think Times New Roman is a particularly bad font. Although it is overused everywhere and may cause eyesores due to this fact, the font itself is serious and a standard in many areas and thus is my second favourite font (after Helvetica.)
The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)
LaTeX makes it easy to make something clean out of a bunch of text.
But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing a lot of time. For now, i tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia, metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...
Graphics are orthogonal to a Latex document. You specify where to find the graphic, what format it's in and how to orient it. Making the graphic is outside of the Latex process, which I am fine with.
All papers I make for publication have data graphs and figures aplenty, and it would still take me longer with Word.
I agree that including figures is a strong part of LaTeX, I believe, as you have good control over it. What takes times, is drawing a diagram to illustrate something.
Resorting to external tools and inserting is OK, but you often don't have the same visual quality as the rest of the document. Here I don't know many really good tools. That's why people still take a lot of time with pstricks, TikZ and the likes!
Try sitting down for two hours to study the most common LaTeX typesetting commands and to learn how to write your own macros. Text documents should then be marginally slower in LaTeX than Word, and anything with equations far faster.
Ditto. Especially if become capable of using TeX-editing software like Ultra-TeX in Emacs or Vim-LaTeX, with their auto-completion features, you'll be able to write properly typeset text documents in a fraction of the time it takes to write and format them in a WYSIWYG word processor.
Also, it is much easier to combine content from many different TeX files than from Word/OO files, which makes it much easier to do things like compile lecture notes for a class or discussions notes for a project.
I view learning TeX as something like learning how to use vi or emacs. It's difficult, often painful, and hard to see the benefits in the beginning compared to †he big office suites you're used to, but once you get past the initial learning curve, you become remarkably more productive.
Times New Roman was designed for small newsprint, printed as cheaply as possible on crappy paper. For that it works fairly well. At normal size, though, its schizophrenic design becomes an eyesore.
More importantly, the default Microsoft versions of Times New Roman have shitty kerning, are set not to use ligatures by default, use capitalized (“lining”) numbers, and so forth. If you redid all of the kerning tables by hand, and used a better typographic engine than MS Word, you could get Times New Roman to look passable; it’s never going to be beautiful though.
It's actually currently my favorite font. It looks awful if you stick to size-twelve nothing-special all-black formatting, but you can make it look gorgeous on a web page and keep it readable. And on print it's absolutely top-rate: used well I actually prefer it to Garamond.
And, for the record: it's better than original Times in a lot of ways. I don't think it handles numbers or the @ sign as well, but the actual characters are much more balanced.
Agreed, LaTeX is a huge pain for anyone not familiar with programming and the sort of syntactic manipulation needed.
I have noticed that Apple's Pages, while idiosyncratic in its own bizarre ways, does fulfill a number of the author's complaints regarding other word processors, particularly when it comes to ligatures and old-style figures (the numerals with ascenders and descenders).
Combining Pages with LaTeXiT (http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/latexit_en.php) is my current favorite setup. Pages takes some getting used to but after prolonged use I find it easier to use than Word or Writer. Word is a pain under OS X. LaTeXiT accepts LaTeX markup and produces a image which can be dragged into a Pages Document, perfect for sporadic equations.
If it's just a single menu command you can just use the standard way of doing it for an app on OS X: Open System Preferences, go to the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, click on the plus and fill out the form to add your shortcut (remember that Menu Title should be the exact title of the menu item, including any ellipses(…)).
It's simply a question of the rate of diminishing returns when using a program such as LaTeX to typeset. I must say that I prefer Word largely for school-related documents; however, I have been known to write up a report-or-two in LaTeX as well. The final output is superior to what Word can produce, though there are few circumstances wherein it is truly worth the extra time and effort to typeset in such a program.
That really depends on experience. I remember when I started out with latex that it would take me hours to do the simplest of things but now, I take notes in it in class on the fly and I can handle all the formatting immediately. Also, using latex with an inferior editor will make life excruciating. I would advise emacs with latex-mode (and in my case, several hundred lines of customizations) but vim is also a good choice. If however, you try latex with crap like notepad, nano, pico, or gedit... well, you are asking for hell and you will get it.
Is there any way to have it display the rendered page as-you-type? That would make taking notes much easier, since you could see the equations or such that you were writing as your wrote them.
(Disclaimer: I have no experience with LaTeX, and I'm not yet in college so I can't take notes using a laptop... I'm just being curious here.)
Emacs running under X will do basic formatting (italic, bold, larger text, etc.) all on its own. There are packages out there that will do more elaborate previews. Googling gives: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/auctex
I second auctex, it's preview mode is a godsend when formatting tables and formulas. It also has dozens of helpers for switxhing environments, defining and using macros, etc.
It comes with reftex, which, by itself, makes it worth learning. Reftex automatically searches bibtex files for regexps, makes cross-references easy and a lot of other useful things.
As scott_s suggested, LyX is a prominent LaTeX WYSIWYG editor. I use TeXmacs (http://texmacs.org) on Linux because I input a lot of Greek characters and do a lot of Maxima computations while taking class notes, and the ease of Ctrl-Enter makes it like Mathematica notebooks but much faster for writing. It doesn't save natively in LaTeX format like LyX does, and doesn't implement all of LaTeX, but it's an option worth considering if you're in a similar situation.
As has already been mentioned, LyX and TeXmacs are possibilities. Try plain LateX a few times before jumping for the wysiwyg option. It may be nice to see the final output immediately but the benefit of macros combined with the advanced capabilities of editors like emacs makes pure latex a breeze to work with once you get the hang of it.
And I don't think Times New Roman is a particularly bad font. Although it is overused everywhere and may cause eyesores due to this fact, the font itself is serious and a standard in many areas and thus is my second favourite font (after Helvetica.)