Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/
Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
Modern LaTeX
11–20 of 224 posts
Re: Modern LaTeX
#12Re: Modern LaTeX
#13LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer". These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw t…
> I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".
Don't you need to insert tons of `frame` environments to get anything worth looking at?
Re: Modern LaTeX
#14Trivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced "lay-tek". Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've been quite a time. As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
Another fun trivia:
The "La" in latex is Leslie Lamport. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/
Re: Modern LaTeX
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.
I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM.
Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt.
Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#16Trivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced "lay-tek". Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've been quite a time. As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between the written and spoken forms of words were used as a form of gatekeeping between elites and commoners. Same goes for arXiv.
The great thing about language is that you can just change things if enough people play along. Call it gif or jif, arxiv or archive, latex or laytek.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#17LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer". These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw t…
I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX. Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.
> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case.
I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the de facto standard of scientific and technical document typesetting.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.
Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more.
I'm sure you remember that quite clearly.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#19I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript.
The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms.
Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot to be said about printing an article to read. It seems to me that adding responsiveness to journal articles instead of using a fixed paper layout regardless of media might be a good improvement for many readers in many situations.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#20LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer". These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw t…
Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.