pmt VS boxesandglue

I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it really boils down to the following:

LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was envisioned by the original authors.

I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that LaTeX had something as flexible as CSS for styling documents rather than the awkward commands, etc. used now—so much so that I attempted to replace LaTeX with a HTML & CSS -> PDF workflow in the past [0]. It is still an idea I want to revisit someday when I have more time.

[0] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt

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)