LaTeX for PDF generation in production

Question

I used LaTeX for writing couple of white papers while I was in grad school. From that I have a really good impression about it in terms of what LaTeX allows user to do, espe

Answer 1

I've done a few in-house "production level" documents in LaTeX.

Generating LaTeX documents in Windows is an overall horrible experience, to be honest. I was never able to find any solution besides Cygwin. Once you've got the Cygwin environment up and running, it was as simple as picking out the LaTeX and related libraries from Cygwin's setup.exe.

I haven't tried running LaTeX from a non-Cygwin environment, but in theory you should be able to just run C:\Cygwin\usr\bin\latex.exe -- then there's a chance it will be missing paths since you're not in Bash, in which case you might need to just pass the include directories to subsequent programs.

If you decide to use Docbook instead of LaTeX for your documentation (and I would recommend at least giving it a look, it's much more structured for software-related technical documentaion), I had good experience running dblatex under Cygwin. It's not in the Cygwin repositories, but it's a piece of cake to install from source.