Are there any other solutions to document typesetting with latex-like features? TeX is very obtuse for someone who hasn't been using it for a long time.
A common solution is to use LaTeX, but to use it indirectly: write in Markdown and convert to PDF using Pandoc [1], which uses LaTeX in the background. This is (part of) the process used in RMarkdown [2], for example. That way, you get all the benefits of TeX and LaTeX but without most of the pain.
I've seen some people do org-mode -> TeX -> research paper. It's very impressive. I just wish there was something like that with a more GUI/polished feel.
I've been using org-mode and exporting it to HTML. Then making an @media(print) style sheet and exporting the HTML/printCSS to PDF through princeXML.
It's been amazing. Latex equations are exported as pngs (for PDF export because I don't think prince does Mathjax, but org mode can export to mathjax). I have my bibliography with bibtex2html. And templating my pdfs becomes so much easier than with latex. It's just HTML CSS !! My figures are numbered and captioned and referenced throughout the text, same for tables. And my table of content is generated. And code is highlighted. And I have access to ditaa for ascii flow charts and a bunch of other stuff (for making uml in ascii with png export for the PDF for example). It also handles excel like tables with formulae (possible to have lisp formulae !! So cool !!) in text mode !!. And of course, you can plot your table through gnuplot inside your org file. You tell it which columns and rows, the type of graph etc :)
It's also easy to include other org files, or to go down to raw HTML for the export (rather than org mode->HTML) if need be (for a picture than spans over 2 pages for instance).
Give it a try, you might like it ;) In the end it's just an org mode export to HTML to PDF with the print CSS media query. But it works remarkably well and you have all the org mode features.
Any particular reason why you don't use org-mode's latex export (org-latex-export-to-pdf / C-c C-e l p) directly? It will render math nicely, not as embedded images, etc.
It's really because of theming. I was trying to theme my latex document, but it don't know tex well. I do know CSS well though. So theming my header, my margins, my bloquotes, my images etc is very easy in CSS. I have no idea how to achieve this easily with tex.
For lightweight stuff, there's vanilla Markdown, but you have no control over formatting. For more serious work using markdown, you can try out Ulysses[0] or Scribus[1].
And, if you feel like spending an obscene amount of money, on the order of $10k, there's Arbortext APP[2]. (I don't know why this even exists?)
There was Lout[1], but it seems to be abandonded. I really liked it, especially the simpified syntax (compared to latex). It was also unicode-safe by design.
UNIX has been doing that for the past 40 years until AT&T ripped troff out of standard UNIX installations.
Look into groff and possibly heirloom doctools. It's fairly difficult to learn and the default macro packages on most installations may be somewhat difficult to come to terms with/adjust for your own needs. You're definitely expected to learn basic troff macros to hack up a macro package if needed. See also: http://www.schaffter.ca/mom/ and https://utroff.org/
You might want to check out LyX. It is a GUI editor that generates beautiful TeX documents but it is designed to be an user-friendly document processor instead of just a TeX GUI.
[1]: https://pandoc.org/index.html [2]: http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/