Every conference has their own required LaTeX style file that must be used. Unless there is an automated way to convert these exactly, I don't see how LaTeX alternatives can be used.
CS strongly prefers LaTeX [0,1] while broader journals and conferences prefer MS Word over it [2,3]. As long as there is not a solid infrastructure for these other typesetting systems, I never saw the appeal. I think for internal company reports they do have their uses, but other than that, why not use the LaTeX or Word? Realistically any person wanting to submit a work will know how to work with either one or the other.
I also don't see the need for journals and conferences to make a typst template for exactly these reasons. The templates will have to be community-made and then you still run the risk of having a paper rejected a year from now because the template is outdated.
I'm just saying that these systems don't work for me. I write ML/AI conference papers in LaTeX, and I think that use case will be tough to dislodge. I can see this being very attractive to people making other types of documents without a fixed format, especially if you don't already know LaTeX.
Depends on the user. Basic LaTeX2e/LuaTeX can be learned over 5 days. Guru level like any programming language needs its 10K hours. There are people who have an aversion for backlashes. The main reason for the "\" is perhaps the only char that is not commonly found in texts. Others like ":" re very common in texts. When parsing LaTeX and behind it is Knuth's original TeX engine, the commands are swimming in a sea of text (as the Dragon book says).
One thing that has helped with ease of use is Overleaf. It is a hosted LaTeX editor with lots of collaboration features (leaving comments, history of edits) that let people collaborate in real time on a paper. It comes with many templates to get you started on a new document. If you're working with collaborators, it has a lock on the market.
LaTeX itself can be easy for simple things (pick a template, and put text in each section). And it can grow into almost anything if you put in enough effort. It is far and away the standard way to write math equations, so if your document has lots of formulas, that's a plus.
I settled using latex with tectonic, you could always leverage playwright or similar for easy html -> print to pdf without any weird libs? (not great startup time, but you can batch many ops in one session)
# justfile ── put in repo root
set shell := ["bash", "-cu"] # one shell → predictable env, pipe-fail, etc.
# Build a PDF once
pdf:
tectonic -X compile src-v0.1/main.tex --outdir target/pdf # or swap for typst
