The standard journal style that most introductions to TeX will advise you to use is rather ugly for anything other than a journal article, and not all that great for even that. The margins are silly, the font is poor (especially on computer screens), and the spacing is tight. Learning a few additional commands related only to typography will help improve your output. Still further, TeX, like any programming language, has at least its share of mysterious behaviours, bewildering documentation, and good old-fashioned stupidity. Despite my ten years of experience, I learn something new with every project. On this page, I hope to record some of the tips I've picked up, many from other pages such as this. My thanks to all those who have contributed over the years. However:

Don't trust web pages, including this one! TeX is constantly evolving. Webpages often do not keep pace, even if they are maintained. In my experience, most of what you will find online is out-of-date, poor advice (in that there is an easier or better way), or just plain wrong. I hope that my suggestions below will be taken not as fiat, but rather as what I have found to work the best, and with the understanding that since I typed these lines, there are probably many new packages that have appeared at CTAN with still better answers.

Don't bother converting from DVI. Use PDFTeX. This also allows for font protrusion resulting in better-looking justified text with the microtype package, and setting the PDF document properties, using bookmarks, including hyperlinks, and enabling text searching with the hypertext, cmap, hyperxmp, and hypcap packages.

Don't use the Computer Modern fonts, if for no other reason than everyone else is using them. It used to be that this was the only option for full math symbol support. Now, there are many options, with a number of groups working on more. See the Font Catalogue.

Don't use the default margins, if for no other reason than it wastes paper. Try the geometry package.

Don't use the default font spacing. Math symbols cry out for a little extra space, and some fonts do as well. Try the setspace package, which can also double-space documents.

Have your bibliographies done for you with BiBTeX and MathSciNet, and make your citations look better with the breakcites and cite packages (making sure to load them in that order, and don't use them with hyperref). The prettyref package goes a long way towards standardizing all of your references, and makes sure you don't accidentally call a theorem a lemma. If you're having trouble finding or remembering the labels of your equations, bibliography items, or the like, using the showkeys package will cause the labels to be printed in the PDF file (but will interfere with cite and breakcites). When finished, remove it.

TeX was not programmed perfectly. Try the fixmath, mathtools, mathdots, ellipsis, and tabls packages to improve various small spacing and display issues.

The hyperref package can have some issues. Avoid mathematics in any section or chapter titles (although there is a workaround-see the manual). Second, if you have two pages numbered one (for example, page i and page 1), hyperref will not be able to distinguish between them. International standards call for documents like dissertations have all pages numbered and numbered with arabic numerals, and this is the best for electronic documents as well. If your school (or boss) insists on using roman page numbers, there is a workaround.

Make delimiters (such as parentheses and brackets) match the size of the stuff they are delimiting.