Whenever I try to learn more about TeX or LaTeX, I am stymied by the general bias of the books and online resources I have seen, and possibly by the bias of LaTeX itself. I am not interested in using TeX to typeset books, articles, slides, or journal publications. Instead, I would like to use it for documents that other programs generate. These documents are not of a technical nature.
For example I have a system written in Haskell that takes cooking recipes and generates grocery lists. I need to generate printed output for the recipes and the grocery lists. This of course is not a book or article, and because the output is being generated automatically I don't care about separating presentation and content. Instead my main concern is making the printed output look good. So far I am using roff for this because I have never managed to figure out how to use (La)TeX for something like this.
Another thing that I would like to write is a simple system to take checklists written with very little markup and transform them to a good two-column layout for printing.
What good resources exist for learning (La)TeX if you do not want to write a long structured technical document? It seems that TeX is a typesetting program like roff, so it should be possible to use it for things like this, but I don't know where to start learning. Everything I read starts out with how to write an article.