[billfruit]

Asciidoc is also a good alternative.

Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements?

Major problems include:

- Tables are a huge pain.

- Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful.

- Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should give you bold and italic, but such composability was not happening for a some functions.

-Mixing of physical and logical formatting.

-Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.

[phorkyas82]

The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else.

Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)

[IshKebab]

Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.