- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html
- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside
- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)
- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever
By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?
It's okay if this is not the day to day tool used to render, but this should be possible. It's just a compiler between two languages, and latex happens to be Turing complete (and can display arbitrary things to a PDF), so it's 100% in the "not impossible" category
With such a tool nobody has to know if you use typst personally. Just like, say, nobody has to know you use jj rather than git
I chuckled. I'd love to try out typst when the time comes. But for writing a journal paper, it's still going to be latex.