LaTeX has a huge learning curve, and a mess of online information.

I tried to use it to generate automated reports, and was frustrated at every turn. My usage scenario was a completely offline system to generate reports of a few dozen pages, which included graphics, tables and other visualizations.

1. The whole system download is about 1 or more Gigs. 2. Each report is accompanied by half a dozen files. 3. The choice of packages to use, and the versons to use, is all confusing, with various books and site using various packages, often further customized. 4. The syntax is confusing and jarring, at least to me.

Finally, I ended up using simple template tools to generate HTML with proper semantic structing and CSS print media queries to generate my reports.

I do appreciate the fact that my requirement does not involve laying out content over multiple pages, something which LaTeX is good at. That is very difficult to achieve with HTML and CSS.

But, for use cases where each document page is independent, HTML, CSS and print media queries are great.

You can also use all the exciting javascript visualization libraries to generate awesome graphics.