To become success story

If I want to revise the paper (e.g., submit a revision of a rejected paper to a different conference), the original appearance is not desired, and usually I need to produce a different format, so it does not matter much if the original class and template no longer works. What matters is that I can easily copy my text to the new template. That is mostly easy, but recently I have had to deal with templates that want all kinds of meta-data, and place standard elements such as \title and \author in a non-standard location, which makes things somewhat time-consuming. But the main part of the paper can be reused and revised, with a formatting pass at the end.

Concerning longevity, I have rarely had the need to process a really old work, but just to see how well it works, I have tried a thesis from 1990, and the main text works (graphics are separate, and I would have to invest more time to find out how they were built). I also tried papers from 1992 and 1993, and they compiled fine; the paper from 1992 contains Framemaker graphics, and I no longer have a way to convert that to Postscript, but fortunately I have the Postscript output; for one picture, the placement is slightly wrong, though. The 1993 paper looks fine.

Maybe the advantage with these old papers is that there were no style/class files coming from the publication venue, so I just used article (or, for the thesis, report), and not many packages, either.

When I was using it on a daily basis 30 years ago, I *loved* it. Never having to think about what the output would look like and just typing was really awesome and I haven't found anything getting close to that experience. And I'm still pleased to read papers written using it, which are instantly recognizable. I'm also a bit suspicious about tools that try to imitate it, because, as you say, it has accumulated decades of expertise in what it's doing, so users risk losing great stuff.

LaTeX is great if you're largely happy with what it does. If you need to bend it to your will to obtain a specific effect, that can easily become an exercise in frustration – fortunately now there are extension packages which will let you, e.g., control how chapter and section headings look like, which was something that in the 1990s required fairly arcane knowledge of the insides of LaTeX to change in even minor ways. Similarly, LaTeX input is reasonably straightforward to write once you've got the hang of it, but it is an absolute bear to parse if you want to process it with a tool that isn't LaTeX itself. TeX input, if anything, is worse.

The main problem of the TeX and LaTeX ecosystem is that it is, to a large extent, based on ideas which were innovative in the 1980s, but the publishing world has continued turning in the meantime, and TeX's stability guarantee in particular, while commendable in principle, has largely prevented it from evolving along. When TeX was new, PostScript hadn't really been invented yet, PDF wasn't even on the horizon, font technology looked a lot different from what it does today, and Unicode wasn't a thing at all, but now there is no way around these developments. The solutions that Knuth and his colleagues came up with (DVI, Metafont, and so on) didn't catch on outside the TeX community, so TeX has been chasing what the rest of the world was doing in these areas, through non-standard variants such as eTeX, PDFTeX, LuaTeX, etc.

It is true that it is perfectly possible, in 2025, to use LaTeX to typeset a PDF document with OpenType fonts based on UTF-8 encoded input, but this means you have to run a version of TeX that has special code extensions not necessarily found in other versions of TeX, using special LaTeX packages which may come bundled in a “batteries included” distribution such as TeXLive but are not actually part of LaTeX itself. This fragmentation tends to make life with (La)TeX more difficult. Also, nowadays people expect to be able to write a document in a single source format and render it, without source changes, in wildly different output formats such as HTML and PDF, in a way that avails itself of the specific advantages of the format in question, and TeX/LaTeX doesn't really have a straightforward and obvious answer to that requirement like Markdown, Pandoc, or Sphinx (to name but a few examples) do.

I've been a TeX and LaTeX user for 40 years now but I'm looking at Typst with considerable interest.