I have been using Scrivener for a few months now, and I absolutely love it. I used Pages until I learned there was no autosave, of course at a horrible moment, anyways …
I also use Latex for finished documents and I was just looking over the 2.0 features, trying to decide if I would upgrade. I recently noticed that I can drag items from binder view into a doc and link to them, of course 1.X doesn’t maintain this type of linking upon compilation, which is part of why I use latex for the final docs, however I noticed that there is a pdf export now, cleverly shown in a screenshot.
Question 1) Does pdf export preserve these links?
Question 2) Is Page view mode now able to produce attractive documents? or should final versions still be laid out in another program?
I haven’t checked the PDF linking thing, but with regards to your question about page mode, page mode is only an aesthetic feature which lays out your current document in paginated form on screen as opposed to the classic ‘word processor’ form. It has no effect on the final output of documents.
a) The pdf (via compile > printing/pdf) preserves web or mail links with no problem (the ones created via edit > add link…). Apparently it should also preserve file://xxx. (I’ll be posting this problem on a new topic.)
b) As to the internal links (via edit > Scrivener Link), my experience is that they are not preserved after compilation.
Regarding the second question: I like the end result of Page View mode. Many times the file I export from Scrivener is the final one, w/ no need to edit it in another app. But maybe you should try it and see for yourself.
By the way, since you express preferring LaTeX, have you considered using the MMD arm of Scrivener? It’s basically a .tex generating engine based of a very simple markup code which can get you a 95%–100% complete .tex file straight out of compile. Cross-references and such are all well supported by the technology. That aside, there is also a contingent of users that use Scrivener to type raw LaTeX straight into the draft, using the plain-text exporter to produce the final .tex file.