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Modern LaTeX

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#81

Post by billfruit »

dochtman wrote: post #5

Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/

Asciidoc is also a good alternative.

Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements?

Major problems include:

- Tables are a huge pain.

- Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful.

- Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should give you bold and italic, but such composability was not happening for a some functions.

-Mixing of physical and logical formatting.

-Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#82

Post by fsh »

mgaunard wrote: post #74
fsh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good slides is about good diagrams. LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.

I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#83

Post by goku12 »

misnome wrote: post #40
dochtman wrote: post #5

Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/

“Pricing”, “Sign Up” Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach. There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.

Almost all of typst, except their web app, is available on crates.io and from many Linux distribution repositories. And you can skip the web app if you don't prefer it. There's no loss of functionality.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#86

Post by pietro72ohboy »

kaoD wrote: post #59
misnome wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Pricing”, “Sign Up” Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach. There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.

Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer) but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net negative contributors to free software. So... yeah.

Absolutely agree! Money only becomes an issue when someone asks for it politely. And then people ask why such efforts and projects die in the shadows.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#87

Post by goku12 »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #55
dochtman wrote: post #5

Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/

[flagged]

PDF is used for pre-formatted content with reproducible layout. HTML is used for dynamically formatted, dynamically laid out and often reflowable content. It's debatable whether PDF needs a more modern alternative, but HTML is certainly not a replacement for it. There are several use cases where HTML is not the appropriate choice - especially for carefully laid out documents or books. You can simulate pre-formatted layout in HTML, but it always feels like shoehorning an unintended functionality.

LaTeX and Typst are markup primarily for PDF type contents. Something like Asciidoc or even Markdown is more appropriate for HTML type content. You can always switch the purposes, but I never got a satisfying output by doing that.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#90

Post by so-rose »

iveqy wrote: post #27

I'm looking for something that you can embedd in your own application. LaTeX would be great but it's not really nice to have WEB code in your C application. It's also has a bit troublesome license.

`typst` might meet your needs. No, really.

It embeds almost anywhere, including via client-side WASM, and someone even made a nice TypeScript lib [0]. If you dislike `typst`, it even has a package that transpiles LaTeX strings into native typst, which somehow doesn't seem to make `typst` any less fast [1]. WASM plugin magic will do that!

The curious consequence is that the fastest and most portable way to render lightwight LaTeX code might actually be... To transpile LaTeX to embedded `typst`? Sure, sure, not all of LaTeX will map. But from an 80/20 mindset it might just be enough.

- [0] https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts - [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/

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