There is a learning curve involved in getting comfortable with the LaTeX commands, but thanks to the internet it is easy to find advice and examples to help format almost anything. While LateX is not 'what you see is what you get' editing like the equation editor, it produces really professional looking documents. LaTeX is a professional typesetting system designed by Leslie Lamport to work with the original TeX formatting system created by Donald Knuth in the 1970s. To create professional quality mathematical notation, LaTeX is the current standard used by journal article and textbook authors. While Microsoft Word and Google Docs both have equation editors, the resulting output is not 'typeset quality' like you would find in a textbook. Typesetting mathematics in a professional way requires more than basic word processing.
