Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

Basically the title. As a PhD student I am both astounded at the ease of using LaTeX and constantly annoyed at many of its idiosyncrasies. If I mistype something there is a close to 0 percent chance of the complier pointing me into the right direction. Thus the question, has anyone ever made a serious attempt at displacing LaTeX?

Lyx. It's a graphical front-end for LaTeX.

Groff

Your favourite word processor creates machine readable XML to an open spec, which can cleanly separate style from presentation through styles, much like TeX does. You can build documents entirely from the keyboard as code, or use Python or build your own higher level tools.

You have MathML for math, better defaults like OpenType rather than bitmap fonts, and more emphasis on handling variable screen sizes over single-size paper documents.

The two that come to mind are ConTeXt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt (official: https://contextgarden.net) and DocBook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook (official: https://docbook.org). There are others, but they're less-serious and often not general purpose. Then there's the entire class of Markdown-based solutions (I personally wouldn't attempt academic work with any of those).

The other typesetting system is troff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff (official: https://troff.org), but it isn't a "tried to build something better than TeX/LaTex" since it predates TeX by a few years. Arguably TeX is an attempt at something better than troff.

The case for troff is pretty strong: https://rkrishnan.org/posts/2016-03-07-how-is-gopl-typeset.h...

But honestly LaTeX is so ingrained in academia that it is probably worth sticking with it. You might even learn to love it.