> The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers

Some scientific journals, which only provides a Word template, require you to print to PDF to submit, then ships this PDF to India, where a team recreates the look of the submission in LaTeX, which is then used to compose the actual journal. I wish this was hyperbole. For these journals, you can safely create a LaTeX-template looking _almost_ the same, and get away with it.

The problem is the user-base and acceptance of latex vs Typst. I use latex and as aware as I am about its deficiencies, I can create a doc faster in it than any other tool that I have not ever used before. I also have a bunch of utilities I created for my specific use-cases automating data into tables, figures, etc, ready for latex import.

So its a mass and momentum problem. Typst not only has to be better/easier/faster than latex, but to a degree that it justifies all of the labor and time to learn it and change all that existing template and utility infrastructure built up over decades. A high bar.

If Typst (or some other new contender) could also read and compile latex code and packages alongside its own syntax then that would be a game-changer. Then I can use all my old stuff and gradually change things over to typst (or whatever).

I used latex for over 20 years.

Typst is a breath of fresh air. Interacting with modern tooling (GitHub, discord). Responsive developers. Easy to read code. Easy to do things on your own.

Admittedly, my use case is mainly writing books, I've never published an academic paper.

Until Typst showed up I was a heavy Latex user. My co-workers did not buy into it (Latex) because their claimed that using Google Docs / Docs is faster.

My experience with word processing is that spending a lot more time on UI bugs and incosistencies using any wysiwyg editors, compare to those any markup based system (md, latex, typst) is significant improvement. Typst is just simply faster, cleaner alternative to LaTex. I hope it gets much more popular.

The other option is people who never got into LaTeX get into Typst (usually by being too young to have gotten into LaTeX in college), and Typst takes over slowly that way.

But I thought one of the points of latex was to emit pdf files? Are you saying these places are so backwards they only accept latex and word files? What stops them being edited by someone?

Scientific journals do edit the TeX file. Both to update the visual style (e.g. enabling commercial fonts that they use for print but are not allowed to distribute with the template), and to update the content itself (to revise the grammatical style to fit the style guide followed by that journal, to update scientific references to have clickable links, etc.). Usually, at the end of all these edits, the journal sends a PDF “proof” back to the authors to verify that the final version is OK, or ask for corrections if they broke something (which they often do).

The real problem is that LaTeX is often an interchange format. Whatever tools you use to write the paper, they must ultimately output LaTeX. In the publisher's template, using only the features and packages approved by the publisher, and consistent with any other requirements the publisher may have. The publisher then takes the LaTeX output and processes it further to generate the actual document in whatever format they prefer.