During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: https://www.amazon.de/Evangelische-Akademie-DDR-Bildungsstätten-Widerstand/dp/3374024653
>700 pages in Microsoft Word in 2006. I knew about LaTeX, but was not familiar enough to convert everything to LaTeX and integrate last minute changes on top. The authors of course only knew word and the professor did editing and typesetting in parallel.
Afterwards all my academic text were written in LaTeX with Bibtex and I never looked back.
It is crazy how many highly skilled people put a lot of free work into pushing Linux forward, because of „let’s see, if we can get this thing working!”
I love the free software community.