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Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

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Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#11

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

crngefest wrote: post #3
sprinkly-dust wrote: post #2

Having 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?

I would say probably not.

Markdown is really more about getting words down in plain text with a very simple structure for rendering on the web.

Typst and LaTex make stark distinctions between composing and typesetting. They are programmatic typesetting systems with very structured and fine grained control over the look and design of a document once it's compiled and rendered as a PDF.

If all you're doing is writing prose then I honestly think typesetting programs are overkill unless you do want very fine grained control over how your documents look.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#12

Post by gumbojuice »

sprinkly-dust wrote: post #2

Having 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…

Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that, journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges to LaTeX/Word would fall in place.

For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source).

Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles to LaTeX.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#13

Post by fhd2 »

Seems like it's not built on top of LaTex, so you presumably can't drop into LaTex when Typst can't do what you need, or did I just miss that?

LaTex is positively arcane, but I still use it for all my writing since it's so incredibly versatile: Academic papers, letters, contracts, forms, invoices, tons of packages, pretty easy to apply regional standards, ...

How I manage to not go insane is Org Mode: I can write almost everything in something similar to Markdown but do inline LaTex as needed (since it compiles from Org to Latex to PDF). I find that incredibly powerful.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#14

Post by mr_mitm »

I can't wait for LaTeX to go away in favor of Typst. The experience is night and day. Very impressed with their work.

I've been using Jinja2 templates to generate TeX files, but Typst can take a JSON over the command line and is easy to use and powerful enough that I can completely remove the Python step.

Not to speak of the compile time that is measured in milliseconds.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#15

Post by crngefest »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #8
crngefest wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea that is my setup right now.

I write markdown and use eleventy + nunjucks templates to build the final result.

It’s pretty easy to create new layouts and styles for really any use case with that setup in minutes.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#16

Post by mr_mitm »

fhd2 wrote: post #13

Seems like it's not built on top of LaTex, so you presumably can't drop into LaTex when Typst can't do what you need, or did I just miss that? LaTex is positively arcane, but I still use it for all my writing since it's so incredibly versatile: Academic papers, letters, contracts, forms, invoices, tons of packages, pretty easy to apply regional standards, ... How I manage to not go insane is Org Mode: I can write alm…

True, it can't fall back to LaTeX. It's not there yet, but give them some time and there won't be any cases that Typst can't do that LaTeX can. It's already impressively close if you ask me.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#17

Post by PartiallyTyped »

crngefest wrote: post #15
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have more control over the style and structure. If you use markdown + css, that's a different story.

Yea that is my setup right now. I write markdown and use eleventy + nunjucks templates to build the final result. It’s pretty easy to create new layouts and styles for really any use case with that setup in minutes.

If that's the case, I don't think you will get any benefits by switching to Typst.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#18

Post by arnsholt »

fhd2 wrote: post #13

Seems like it's not built on top of LaTex, so you presumably can't drop into LaTex when Typst can't do what you need, or did I just miss that? LaTex is positively arcane, but I still use it for all my writing since it's so incredibly versatile: Academic papers, letters, contracts, forms, invoices, tons of packages, pretty easy to apply regional standards, ... How I manage to not go insane is Org Mode: I can write alm…

The genius of TeX is that it’s a programming language for document production, that can mostly look like markup. The further genius(?) is that the language works in such a way that you can do more or less arbitrarily complex things, while still exposing an interface to the user that feels like markup. This makes for a language that is sometimes, honestly, completely bananas. But when wielded correctly, it’s great.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#19

Post by Ilasky »

I love Typst. It’s especially good for dealing with programmatic input as the —input flag can take json. [0] Then, in the file it’s easy to get the json with the dedicated json.decode() function. Super easy to get solid results. Swapped to it from LaTeX in my own project [1]

[0] https://typst.app/docs/reference/foundations/sys/

[1] https://resgen.app

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#20

Post by MaxBarraclough »

I'm surprised to see that HTML output is currently in progress, and was not a core feature from the start. [0]

LaTeX's awkward relationship with the web seems like something a competing greenfield project would try to nail right out of the gate (to mix metaphors painfully).

[0] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721

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