I've formatted three books self-published by my wife. The first in Pages (better than Word for nearly everything except document interchange), and the latter two in LaTeX.
I'll take LaTeX. It's more reliably reproducible. Once I got the basic format created (for her second book)—which took about as much time as it took to format the first book in Pages—the third book took about a tenth the time. My tooling was in place.
It's not for everyone, and you really have to either dig deep or find a macro set that does what you want (or both—I'm using a macro set on top of scrbook). There is room for something better, but that something better is not Word (or Pages).
(I'd almost say that what LeanPub does is good enough, but their LaTeX typography sucked when I tried it almost two years ago.)
I'll take LaTeX. It's more reliably reproducible. Once I got the basic format created (for her second book)—which took about as much time as it took to format the first book in Pages—the third book took about a tenth the time. My tooling was in place.
It's not for everyone, and you really have to either dig deep or find a macro set that does what you want (or both—I'm using a macro set on top of scrbook). There is room for something better, but that something better is not Word (or Pages).
(I'd almost say that what LeanPub does is good enough, but their LaTeX typography sucked when I tried it almost two years ago.)