The Design of Forms in Government Departments (1962)

Contemporary illustrators are Adobe professionals who Dribbble their way through the design world, churning out Corporate Memphis: https://www.are.na/claire-l-evans/corporate-memphis

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

At a meta level, here's what the document itself advises about wordiness:

> Avoid unnecessary words, e.g. the phrase ‘In every case in which particulars are furnished’ (eight words), can be reduced to ‘When particulars are given’ (four words): a phrase such as ‘It should be noted that the obligation to furnish particulars’ (ten words), is no less clear when reduced to ‘The obligation to give particulars’ (five words).

In a modern, plain english style, these might be further chopped down to 'When provided' (two words) and 'Mandatory when' (two words).

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)