Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
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Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#2Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like.
In comparison to LaTeX, overall document typesetting is far more straightforward. However, for long multi-page stretches of equations solving, I feel that LaTeX is easier to type than Typst because its syntax is not that of a functional programming language but more akin to markdown. Thus, one does not need to think as far in advance when typesetting equations with lots of functions, superscript, and subscript.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#3Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like. In com…
As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#4A number of past discussions and related things: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=typst
1 year ago, 146 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210
8 months ago, 34 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422
2 years ago, 53 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590
2 years ago 30 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209794
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#5I've been finding Typst a great tool for ~90% of my use-cases — in the other 10%, I'll still reach for LaTeX for the extra power (tikz, pdf images, tagged pdfs (!) (this is becoming more and more of a requirement when publishing/submitting academic texts, and AFAIK Typst does not support it yet), but that's okay. Excited to see where it goes, as LaTeX is very beginner unfriendly and I'd love to see the barrier to entry for typesetting lowered so my more non-technical friends can share in the power of pretty texts & CVs.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#6This feels like a mix of markdown readability with latex control. I'm not sure yet that I need that middle ground. Currently I'm doing docs in markdown, reports in Python generated tex, coupled with hardcoded preambles. That seems fine so far.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#7Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like. In com…
As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?
It depends on what you are doing with your markdown files. For example, if you are using them as the source for a statically generated website typst won't do much for you.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#8Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like. In com…
As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?
You have more control over the style and structure. If you use markdown + css, that's a different story.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#9I've been finding Typst a great tool for ~90% of my use-cases — in the other 10%, I'll still reach for LaTeX for the extra power (tikz, pdf images, tagged pdfs (!) (this is becoming more and more of a requirement when publishing/submitting academic texts, and AFAIK Typst does not support it yet), but that's okay. Excited to see where it goes, as LaTeX is very beginner unfriendly and I'd love to see the barrier to ent…
At least for a tikz equivalent, I found cetz [1] to be very useful.
I am not sure how it compares feature-wise. But I could easily build some graphs with it.
The one thing that really makes me excited when using Typst is that I find it very intuitive, meaning the time between not knowing how to do a certain thing and me being pleased with the result is much shorter with Typst compared to latex.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#10Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like. In com…
As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?
With or without equations, just use MonsterWriter. It gives you LaTeX results without needing to know what LaTeX is.
But, yes LaTeX has other benefits, e.g. citing references, or creating PDFs according to layout and typesettings best practices.