Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.
Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources and so on.
Yeah, I wrote a paper using typst - which was much more pleasant to draft. But for the final version submitted to the journal, we ended up converting it to latex because that's what the journal wanted.
I think it'll be hard to dislodge latex for academic papers - particularly in CS. But there's plenty of other uses for it. Personally I'm looking forward to HTML output. I want to use it to write blog posts and long form documentation. (Markdown simply isn't powerful enough for my needs.)
Otherwise you become Dvorak, which despite being better than Qwerty and having been around for almost a hundred years, still hasn't seen widespread adoption, in this case because the awkwardness of switching is very significant. The effect is likely smaller on something like Typst.
> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.
There are lots of people (myself included) who genuinely like LaTeX, so it's not just inertia preventing people from switching (although that is definitely a significant factor).
Typst on the other hand is completely sensible.
It takes less time to learn typst than to refresh on latex.
I think it depends on what the thing is. I use LaTeX for occasional documentation, a better version would save me a maximum of 5 minutes a year. I probably won't be an early Typst adopter.
But, I spend loads of time for example, working with dataframes in Python. I got into Polars fairly early because improvements in that space can massively affect my productivity.
If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.
I don't know. By then aren't you quite comfortable with LaTeX?
It may be Stockholm syndrome and sunk costs speaking, but I'm using LaTeX all the time: I quite like it and I don't feel any need for something else to replace it...
I suspect it is actually worse than that and that they are actually subject to the Lindy effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect ).
My point is, that creating a proper latex document, specific to one's use case can consume many hours of time.
Our basis vectors are very much wide of the mark.