[nextos]

This is a topic I have been interested in for a while. Is it viable to compose fancy large documents in plain TeX without a lot of effort replicating functionality provided by LaTeX (if your requirements stay constant)?

I am a heavy user of the memoir class, and I have always suspected moving to plain TeX would not be that hard. However, the fraction of users doing this seems pretty slim so modern TeX workflows do not seem really well documented.

[grayclhn]

I’ve tried. Coauthors and journal requirements were my limiting factors, not anything inherent to the typesetting engines…

These days (in industry) I manage to use pandoc markdown to word for everything (for similar reasons), which is even more limiting than plain TeX. You learn to write around the limitations pretty quickly. :)