@JorisMeys Academic markdown with pandoc is great. I've been running conferences with markdown templates since 2015. PDFs are not the end game, they're inaccessible and don't reflow. But generating both html and pdfs from the same markdown template is a good compromise. LaTeX is fine as an intermediary step, but I don't think authors need to write it directly really, and the vast majority of authors will refuse to go anywhere near it.