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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

#71

Post by CJefferson »

2cynykyl wrote: post #70
gumbojuice wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Arxiv will accept a rendered pdf, no source files required. Are any special features unlocked if source files are uploaded?

They autoconvert latex to html. Typst can't currently produce html output.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#72

Post by nanna »

CJefferson wrote: post #45
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #20

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

Yes, latex's HTML output is fairly good nowadays, after a lot of people made very heroic efforts to put it in a system never intended to support it. Starting a new markup system with no plan for making accessible documents was, in my opinion, a very bad idea. I refuse to use typst until it can produce accessible documents.

> Yes, latex's HTML output is fairly good nowadays, after a lot of people made very heroic efforts to put it in a system never intended to support it.

Mind saying more? Didn't know there'd been progress here.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#73

Post by SkiFire13 »

arnsholt wrote: post #18
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.

Typst is also a programming language for document production, however they made the decision to make the code side an actual scripting language, which makes writing custom logic much easier than in Latex.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#74

Post by nanna »

pgen wrote: post #36

I personally prefer ConTeXt ( https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone ). It's comparable to LaTeX, but better in my opinion.

I could never get my head around the use case for ConTeXt. It seemed like LaTeX minus defaults that have been defined by typographers and the massive ecosystem. Care to say more?

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#75

Post by rochak »

Have been using it for a while. Can’t overstate how much better the experience has been compared to LaTeX. As someone who had to use LaTeX not out of choice, I’m so grateful this exists so that I can no longer bother to decipher the mess of LateX.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#76

Post by wiktor-k »

CJefferson wrote: post #71
2cynykyl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arxiv will accept a rendered pdf, no source files required. Are any special features unlocked if source files are uploaded?

They autoconvert latex to html. Typst can't currently produce html output.

Just for completeness the html export issue is here: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#80

Post by thangalin »

Winsaucerer wrote: post #47
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've had some good replies already, but just want to add my thoughts. Markdown to me is more about (a) the content (the actual words) and (b) the semantics (text emphasis, headings, etc, which communicate information about the importance or meaning of particular things). Typesetting systems like Typst or LaTeX go beyond this. They're also about presentation, how precisely it is laid out, on mediums such as print or…

A few Markdown documents I've converted to PDFs:

* https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf

* https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/technical.pdf

* https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/jekyll-hyde.pdf

Respectfully, keeping presentation logic and content completely separated while having precise control over layout can happen with Markdown, as the example documents demonstrate. The ConTeXt typesetting system makes keeping such separation possible.

The deeper issue relates to the software's architecture, which, IMO, systems like Typst, Obsidian, and others fail to generalize broadly enough. Here's KeenWrite's architecture (the "Proposed" row):

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/raw/main/docs/imag...

Although only Markdown is currently implemented, it's possible to plug other text-based input formats to produce an XHTML document. The instructions for how to typeset XHTML documents are defined by a theme. You can think of a theme as an XML to TeX translation layer. From there, going from XML to TeX is straightforward (when using ConTeXt, at least), allowing full control over the final output format (be it PDF, ePub, and so forth).

I am the author of KeenWrite. The following tutorial shows how its themes work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30&list=PLB-WIt1cZY...

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