Typography, page composition, TeX, Quark, alternatives to InDesign

'Float' is not a Latex term, it's a general typesetting term for an element in a separate frame. It's not an (inline) anchored element, since, as Ariel pointed out, they're tied to the page where the anchor is.

Latex floats have various positional parameters (like InDesign's anchored floats) because you have to tell Latex where it should place them. On InDesign you don't need that, you just grab them and place them.

In Latex, getting floats where you want them can be a hassle, it can take several runs to work out the combination of float position and how text runs around it.

InDesign and (La)Tex have a paragraph composer, something that no other system has (they use line composers). Typographically, Latex and InDesign are pretty much equal. Latex doesn't do optical kerning, but some custom kerning can take care of that.

InDesign is much easier to use, especially if you set a text with floats. They can be difficult to handle in Latex; in InDesign is easy.

Latex is much more flexible with footnotes and indexes.

Take your pick!

Coming back to the MS Word example, out-of-the box, i.e. using default settings, a page of text will have rivers of white flowing through it. But with some configuration of justification settings and hyphenation a designer might get better results.

Hi @A2D2 , I'm guessing that would be true with any of the apps to a certain degree, including InDesign. Here is a column of text with InDesign’s default Justification on the right vs. a custom settings on the left.

I don't know about Tex, but QuarkXPress has a couple of rather esoteric type packing features that can be used to create better type — kerning/tracking in thousandths of an em, the ability to create custom kerning pairs, etc.

If you're an all-out type snob, you can lay out some really beautiful type blocks with Quark. Back in the early '90s when I ran a type service bureau — remember those — my shop developed custom type packing for some 40 fonts using Quark's custom typefitting capabilities. For us, it saved time in the long run to invest that attention up front instead of fine tuning every typesetting job on the fly, and gave us a unique product differentiator to offer high-style output that our other two competitors in the market couldn't match.

The shop was started as a traditional typesetting operation purchasing a half-million bucks of Quadex Q5000 phototypesetting system with four terminals, and a reputation for providing high-quality type galleys and typographic page setup for the ad industry and select independent graphic designers.  We blew some serious labor time creating those custom-kerned font sets to approximate the typefitting output of that old-school Quadex setup people paid through the nose for. We had a few takers — maybe enough to cover our cost to develop those custom-kerned font sets, maybe not. 

But when art directors discovered they could set their own type with QuarkXPress, and to a lesser extent, PageMaker and ReadySetGo, the typefitting lapses that would have persnickety art directors sending galleys back to us for redos flew right on by when they were doing a mediocre job packing type in house. To the point, I believe, that most ad agencies and clients can no longer tell the difference between mild attention and meticulous care setting type. 

And even if you could tell the difference, InDesign offers mostly equivalent capabilities of Quark today, with the exception of building custom kerning pairs within font tables for easier future use. And to be honest, these days I don't know if that difference is worth much of anything anymore.

That's my two cents, for as little as it's worth.

Randy

Consider Tracking.

Are you looking for a way of finding those "white rivers" in the InDesign?