On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 9:50 PM, Marcin Borkowski
My 3 cents: if you want to have your thesis done *quickly* and in an easy, "howto - recipe - faq" way, just use LaTeX (probably with amsrefs/tikz/memoir/a few others). If you want to do more unusual things, and have some spare time to play with them and ask a lot of questions here - use ConTeXt. (Some time ago, on the blog of the Malaysian LaTeX User Group (http://latex-my.blogspot.com/) there was a nice example of having a colourful, good-looking book done in LaTeX, btw, so it's also possible, of course; but LaTeX was *not* designed with such things in mind.)
It is not just a matter of typesetting the thesis in ConTeXt---ConTeXt is a subject of study. But even barring that, my brief experience with LaTeX was more than enough to know that the very design of the macro package irks me to a degree I would not like to use it at all, for whatever purpose. It is like Ruby on Rails: "convention over configuration." No thank you, I'm not looking for a thesis that looks like an AMS paper, and no matter how hard ConTeXt can be to start learning, my money is that hacking LaTeX to make it look the way I want is much much more difficult. The thesis also has to target both electronic and print PDFs. There is just nothing LaTeX offers me besides a poorly designed (imo) system that will take as much time, if not more, to learn how to customize to my liking than ConTeXt.
And please, *do* read the TeXbook - it's sooooo much fun!
As I said, it will be read. I was just trying to discern in which order.