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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/4936
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Any text-based "markup" format -- LaTeX, HTML, various XML schemas like DocBook, etc -- will serve you better than binary formats like Word, Pages, FrameMaker, etc. (I am aware that some of these tools export XML or SGML.) The reasons include:

- Decoupling from editors. You can use your favorite tool to edit any of these, which gives you more flexibility.

- Conversion to other formats is probably easier and at least no worse. If you want to take your Word document and convert it to HTML for your blog, probably you're going to end up cutting and pasting and re-adding the format directives. Converting from LaTeX to HTML, on the other hand, can probably be largely scripted (hedge because I'm very rusty with LaTeX). If your document is 5 pages long maybe you don't care much; if it's 500 pages, or you're going to be doing this a lot, you do.

- It's a better foundation for producing output for multiple platforms. Depending on what you're doing you might only need to change a style sheet to go from book-style output to newsletter-style output, for instance.

Original score: 12