It depends on your notion of "fancy" and your tolerance of dependencies.

Modern CSS can do all of this, but you'll need a browser like app to produce PDF.

Since HTML is NOT supposed to be a print format you'll end up with the same entropy like LaTeX.

I'm using Emacs org-mode to have nice markup translated to LaTeX/PDF, also for beamer presentations.

This hides the boilerplate for me, but LaTeX is not particularly fast.

But without more clarification about your requirements it's a rather fuzzy question.

Edit

And of course it has been discussed before for many times. Just search the archives.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

In reply to Re:producing fancy text by LanX
in thread producing fancy text by BernieC

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