SympyTeX VS boxesandglue

You can embed CAS-generated equations and computations in LaTeX[1]. This came in handy for undergraduate linear algebra homework that combined proofs (where I could use my existing LaTeX macros) and computations (where we were expected to use a CAS). Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks would also work, but I prefer Emacs over the notebook UI (and Jupyter didn't actually exist at the time).

[1] See, e.g., https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/

You might also want to take a look at existing libraries how they generate PDF. For example the PDF backend library at https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue (from me). Or create simple documents with PDFTeX for example, PDFTeX produces clean output.

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua.

See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction.

I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming.

My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)