I'm completely new to the LaTex, TexLive, Lyx, Kile, and Texmaker waters, stumbling through online guides a little at a time. My interest is primarily in "old fashioned" manuscript formatting because some publishers still want 1970s-style formatting and OpenOffice isn't the ideal text editor for that. I'm a control freak and LaTex, TexLive and the respective gui front-ends have such diverse output formats for flexibility. I Like options
I'm also looking to LaTex for producing attractive advance reading copies in pdf form to get feedback from a select group of readers who use devices like the eCoolerReader, Nook, Kobo, Kindle, etc.