The reasoning behind using LaTeX is to have full control over the layout, fonts, etc.

pdflatex can produce very professional output, see e.g. http://www.pragma-ade.nl for samples.

Another important point is using POD for diffent type of documentation. I think the whole Perl Cookbook was written with enriched POD.

Ah, I rather thought it might be something like that, but decided to provide what I could anyways. :) And perrin provided an excellent example on how good the result good be above (I downloaded those PDF's and it was very nice IMO).

As for using POD for documentation, I wholeheartedly agree. I am trying to write more and more stuff in POD for this reason, including company docs that can be transfered to other formats. I'm not there yet, but I am trying.

As for books, I don't know about the Cookbook, as I don't own it, but the Camel book says it was written entirely in POD. It is mentioned in the POD chapter among other places. So it is definetely good enough. :) As the authors say themselves:

We don't claim that pod is sufficient for writing a book, although it was sufficient for writing this one.

Personally, I think one of the absolute best things with POD is that it is also easy to read unprocessed. There are no other formats I know about, that is as easy. Note that I said "that I know about", though. And plain text doesn't really count either, because it doesn't contain any processing instructions. :)

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