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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

#32

Typst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we’re very happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every night and experimented with various solutions—from Puppeteer for HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn’t a pleasant developer experience, but with T…

What is the use case for generating that many PDFs?

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#33
post #32

Typst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we’re very happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every night and experimented with various solutions—from Puppeteer for HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn’t a pleasant developer experience, but with T…

What is the use case for generating that many PDFs?

Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India are required to generate this document called “Contract Notes” which includes all the trades done by the user on the stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this has to be emailed to every user before the next trading session begins.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#34
post #23

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

Someone mentioned that pandoc works decently for this.

It does not.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#35
post #24

LaTeX is not just a set of macros over TeX to produce (nowadays) some pdf, it's a very big library of ready-to-use packages for pretty anything, that's VERY hard to "substitute". You want inspiration for some strange table layouts? There are gazillion ready made; some graph? TiKz/PGF have gazillions of ready made examples... Want a programming language in the middle? Python, Lua etc can be embedded straight away. So…

Exactly. It's not too difficult to imagine replacing LaTeX for some fairly straight-forward documents. But just by casually browsing tex.stackexchange.com, you'll soon find out that people use LaTeX for an amazingly wide range of different things, and it's capable of serving many, many edge cases very well. To be on par with that is a very hard goal. Let's not forget, LaTeX has been around forever, and consequently has grown into an incredible complex and varied ecosystem.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the use case for generating that many PDFs?

Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India are required to generate this document called “Contract Notes” which includes all the trades done by the user on the stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this has to be emailed to every user before the next trading session begins.

There are of course way more efficient methods for generating templated pdfs than using a typesetter.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#38
post #23

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

Someone mentioned that pandoc works decently for this.

I am using pandoc to transfer some of my notes to the web: https://ykonstant1.github.io/power-draft.html

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#39
I guess this is a competitor to services such as overleaf [1] and codimd [2]. Although this is yet another syntax, it seems to be supported by pandoc [3]. Lately, I have been using Quarto [4] more and more as I program in R, which also produces very nice outputs, especially HTML. But none of these solve the academic usage problems of (1) producing nice diffs for reviewers, and (2) can easily be shared with, and commented by, non-technical collaborators. Thus, I fear Word will be difficult to replace for many years, at least in my field, for scientific writing

[1] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

[2] https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd

[3] https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output.html

[4] https://quarto.org/

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India are required to generate this document called “Contract Notes” which includes all the trades done by the user on the stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this has to be emailed to every user before the next trading session begins.

There are of course way more efficient methods for generating templated pdfs than using a typesetter.

I'm interested to hear what you would propose.
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