I'm in with the LaTeX crowd. You only need to know some basic markup, and you can have a very presentable document, letter, article, slide presentation, CD labels, business cards... If you're in need of a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editor, try LyX. LaTeX has been getting plenty of development effort in the form of TeXLive distribution. I'm also in agreement about the DVCS, though I tend to use Monotone. I would place git in second place and Mercurial in third for preference. Subversion is O.K, but it's not really intended for disconnected operation. You can't "check in" your changes incrementally if you can't connect to your central server. All in all, any revision control is helpful. Good luck! Chad