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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I have no idea what TeX is. (Something in my brain says it's a Unix thing?)
Is it something I could easily format my own ebooks for? Part of why I use PDFs is that I'm very comfortable formatting Word docs for conversion to PDF; I don't have any HTML-editing software that's nearly as easy to work with, so I don't format for ePub & mobi. (Or, possibly, I just haven't been trained on the software I have.)
Do Word docs convert fluently to TeX docs, if the interpreting device has the right software?
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TeX started out as a Unix typesetting command line tool. It pretty much runs on any major platform now. It accepts marked up plain text (similar to HTML), and outputs a typeset .dvi, .ps, or .pdf file.
Advantages to Tex: it's free, and it produces high-quality professional typesetting suitable for commercial publication. Many major academic journals require article submissions in TeX. It's second-to-none at quality equation typesetting for math journals, which was, unsurprisingly, why TeX was initially written.
Disadvantages: Steep, steep, steep learning curve. You can produce a pretty high-quality typeset page within a few minutes, but to move beyond the basics essentially requires reading a book about it. No WYSIWYG editor, just marked-up plain text.
As to whether your Word docs would translate to TeX, the answer would be not without a conversion tool. There may be one out there in academia-land; I wouldn't be surprised if someone has written something like that. I've never had the need for such a tool, however, so I've never looked for one.