Well, XeLaTeX is what you want to use TTF/OTF while preserving TeX compatibility. It's very stable; I use it for my word processing. As I see it, there are thr

Well, XeLaTeX is what you want to use TTF/OTF while preserving TeX compatibility. It's very stable; I use it for my word processing. As I see it, there are three major issues with TeX: 1. It's very difficult to compose commands (macros? I don't remember the terminology despite having written a small TeX clone) without understanding how they work. I found it very difficult to understand without re-implementation and a lot of reading of the TeX book. 2. Because of 1, it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot by command misordering or not specifying a necessary closing macro. 3. Debugging is very difficult. The error messages are obstruse and make dealing with 2 very difficult. If a layout system managed to address these issues, even by targeting TeX, as pandoc does, many people could deal with some loss of flexibility. However, if you do learn the technology, you can do pretty much anything in print with TeX.