Writing in \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) produces beautiful documents but there’s a pretty steep learning curve. If you’re writing technical documents with lots of mathematics, it’s worth climbing that curve and if you’re an Emacs user, you’ll certainly want to become familiar and adept with AUCTeX.
If you’re a more casual \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) user and just want to write a nice looking report or even a letter, there’s an easier way: Org mode. With Org mode, you simply write in the usual Org markup and then export to \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) or PDF. You can embed \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) commands in the document and add headers to the Org source so that you have pretty much complete control over the look of the final document. It’s even possible to produce journal ready \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) or PDFs as John Kitchen has shown (click to see the list):
It is not just an idea, we use it all the time. Here is a list of papers
and books we have published using #scimax.— John Kitchin (@johnkitchin) April 6, 2018
Sachin Patil has a nice post that shows how easy it is to produce \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) with Org mode. You can produce nice looking documents from a completely vanilla Org file that doesn’t mention \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) at all. Of course, you can also export that same Org file to HTML or any of several other formats.
I do almost all my \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) document preparation through Org mode. I still have some things in \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\) format but those are mostly older or documents with a lot of mathematics in them. If you want to produce nice looking documents, Org mode is an easy way to do it and Patil shows you how.