Nice Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference! That's my favourite quote from it :)

For others, here's the quote being referenced:

> After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shellshocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-­‐Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

The primary feeling I get from using LaTeX is: fear. Any little special thing I adjust tends to break the document, or move figures, or fixing one thing breaks another and so on. And forget about changing templates.

Is what you’re describing something that latex handles well? I’m no expert, but that problem seems solvable by rendering previews with say sampling of large or complex objects vs full builds that maybe take a minute if high fidelity animations or very large graphs are desired as a supported use case in something fully open source

I haven’t explicitly recreated a template for an academic venue, but I have recreated a custom template to match and existing PDF. It was pretty straightforward to recreate it as the language and “standard library” (if you could call it that?) is well designed and has excellent documentation.