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This is a great example of an instance of this "Makefile effect" with a possible solution: use Markdown and Pandoc where possible. This won't work in every situation, but sometimes one can compose a basic Beamer presentation or LaTeX paper quickly using largely simple TeX and the same Markdown syntax you already know from GitHub and Reddit.

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> use Markdown and Pandoc where possible.

That won’t solve any problem that LaTeX macros solve. Boilerplate in LaTeX has 2 purposes.

The first is to factor frequently-used complex notations. To do this in Markdown you’d need to bolt on a macro preprocessor on top of Markdown.

The second one is to fine-tune typography and layout details (tables are a big offender). This is something that simply cannot be done in Markdown. A table is a table and if you don’t like the style (which is most of the time inadequate) then there is no solution.

A much better solution would be to use Typst, but that still might not work in all situations.

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