LaTeX Tooling Guide
What should be step 1: it&#x27;s 2017, you want XeLaTeX or LuaTeX, both capable of native unicode handling, using fonts by name, etc. Traditional LaTeX (and I use &quot;traditional&quot; with scorn as we&#x27;ve had XeLaTeX for almost 15 years now), relying on the ancient pdftex engine, might be &quot;easier to google&quot; (let alone remember), but is also not an acceptable thing to recommend to people if all they want to do is control their typesetting.<p>It&#x27;s like talking about how hard it is to work with browsers and then telling people the best way to set up IE8, instead of using a modern browser.<p>Of course it&#x27;s still you in the typesetting driving seat, it&#x27;s never going to be as easy as Word, but I&#x27;m writing a novella in XeLaTeX right now, not even maths papers, and it&#x27;s almost child&#x27;s play to make it do what I want with minimal effort. My entire &quot;complicated setup&quot; is five lines plus one line that&#x27;s me being completely unreasonable, with XeTeX going &quot;sure, be that way&quot;:<p><pre><code>  \documentclass[11pt, oneside]{book}
  \usepackage{tocloft}
  \usepackage{fancyhdr}
  \pagestyle{plain}
  \usepackage[b5paper, bindingoffset=0mm, inner=23mm, outer=23mm, top=21mm, bottom=24mm]{geometry}
  \input{quotation-rules.tex}
</code></pre>
And that&#x27;s it, the rest of the document is basically just a giant text file of paragraph after paragraph of normal text, using normal as-per-unicode accented letters saved in UTF8. The doc&#x27;s certainly interspersed with \part{} and \chapter{} markers because that&#x27;s how a story works, but there is nothing I couldn&#x27;t explain to my mom in there: I&#x27;m writing a &quot;book&quot; with a table of content, a reasonable looking page header but otherwise plain styling, with some explicit page dimensions (which is no different from using Word for a specific page size).<p>(the only unreasonable demand being that &quot;\input&quot; line, which imports a set of rules for using &quot;Palatino Linotype&quot; as main font, but then pulling the punctuation glyphs from &quot;Sylfaen&quot;. So stuff like full stops, apostrophes, commas, double quotes, etc. And even for something seemingly as complex as that, is just a few more lines using modern XeLaTeX)