General ⇒ The need for professional styles

[sonny]

Hi,

One of the things I miss most in LaTeX is the lack of a catalog of officially-supported professional-quality styles.

Yes, I know it's not hard to tune your own style, and I know there're ready-to-tune classes such as memoir, but that's not the point, because it's also not hard to tune your style with MS Word. One (very serious) difference between LaTeX and Word is that the former is designed to guarantee a professional-quality style at print, while [sarcasm] Word is guaranteed to provide an output in accordance with the taste of the writer [/sarcasm].

So, yes, I know it's easy to tune the LaTeX style, but I don't want to use LaTeX like if it was Word.

This topic was also discussed to some extent here: http://latex-community.org/forum/viewto ... f=5&t=1597

The default LaTeX style is great: you tune nothing, you write your document, you get a professional output.

What I miss is an official catalog of other styles like the default style: you get a professional output without tuning anything.

I feel LaTeX missed one of its goals here, because it just provided a great default style, and let the task of creating other styles as an "exercise to the reader".

Today I wished to try more styles for my documents, supposing they would exist, and supposing using them would be as easy as it was initially thought in the original LaTeX philosophy: just loading the style, and enabling it. But there's no such thing. So, for the moment, I'll continue using the (great) default style, and hope some professional designers will design other styles that can be used just like the default one.