Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/
Does it have better/easier tables. Does it support complex tables like with images in it, with alternating horizontal or vertical text in cells, tables inside tables, tables with alternative row/column shading, etc while still supporting automatic wrapping to contents, etc?
Modern LaTeX
131–140 of 224 posts
Re: Modern LaTeX
#132Typst 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…
Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#133I'm finally updating my CV after years of neglect. I'm keen on switching to the route of Org mode -> LaTeX -> PDF. It's partly because I love the simplicity/power of Org and I do all my writing in it nowadays, the other part is to separate the content from the presentation so I can have the content in two different languages but still end up with the same formatted document for both. Anyone have experience with this…
My go-to template collection is from Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv My cv is an adaptation of one of the templates there: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7... EDIT: ahahahahaha I just came across this cv: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/resume-slash-cv-tem...
Nice CV. Way too much text but I absolutely love the included diagrams. I think interviewers are probably going to glaze over the text but the diagrams are interesting and they practically beg for questions.
I'm totally stealing that.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#134Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX, having written my PhD thesis in it. But with the current tools, I would use Quarto instead. It's much easier, you can still "inject" LaTeX and it's quicker for less technical collaborators to adapt.
$ sudo apt install quarto E: Unable to locate package quarto yeah, hard pass
They have a deb package (if you really wanted to install it)
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/releases/tag/v1.8.1
Re: Modern LaTeX
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst has some of the microtypography features already built-in and enabled by default, like overhang (character protrusion). And there's another microtype PR open, by the reporter of the linked issue (nice!)
This might be one of the areas where it takes a lot of effort to catch up with LaTex. The microtype user manual shows how much thought has gone into it: https://mirror.foobar.to/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/microtype...
How is that pdf made interactive? It has options to toggle the behaviour, which work even in an in browser pdf viewer. I did not think PDFs could do that.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
$ sudo apt install quarto E: Unable to locate package quarto yeah, hard pass
I don't know anything about quarto, but you're missing a lot of useful software if you're limiting yourself to the distro repo - especially Debian stable.
As a matter of principle, i prefer to use really stable software that does not change wantonly, and whose authors took the care to put it into debian.
My 20 year-old .tex documents still compile today. Will the same happen with quarto? (or typst, for that matter?) The fact that they offer no packages in the debian standard distribution signals they have likely succumbed to the awful trend of version churning, where you need to use the last version of the software or else. Thus, probably, in 20 years my documents will be un-compilable. For legacy things like typeset documents, it's reasonable to prefer legacy solutions like latex.
Once quarto and typst have stabilized enough to appear in debian stable, I'll consider them as viable alternatives.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#137I 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…
There was an article on this semirecently that compared among other things HTML and Latex for typesetting. https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines
Re: Modern LaTeX
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster? With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever. Wi…
HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.
Note that this won't prevent the page from being displayed in other sizes, where it will most likely have a broken layout instead.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#139For me Typst replaced Latex years ago. pros: - one small compiler that can output: pdf, png, svg, html - compilation is fast (see below) - syntax is much cleaner than Latex - few ways of to a thing - already has all the templates most people need - tooling is good enough with VS Code - supports SVG images cons: - less users? time typst compile cv.typ ________________________________________________________ Executed i…
Is there any side-by-side comparison of a page created by LaTeX by Typst? My main selling points is that with LaTeX, it is easy to create typography shines beauty for a distance. (Often way better that most of books you find in stores.) With other typesetting systems, usually it is not the case. Yet, I am waiting for new things that offer simplicity, yet have same (or better!) visuals that LaTeX.
As far as I know, the main differences (in the body text) between LaTeX and, say, Word, are the linebreaking algorithm (Knuth-Plass, which is used for both ragged-right and justified text) and the microtypography package. Is there anything else that contributes to the quality of LaTeX's output for ordinary English text?
Typst apparently uses Knuth-Plass, but I don't see any information about microtypography.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation? Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.
I'd say it's already there. See for example the https://pagedjs.org/ project which allows advanced typesetting (including for printing) using web technologies. It is already used in production by at least one book publisher (C&F editions)
I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic - nothing remotely professional, but you still have to start by making a
book block, and Paged.js is a solid call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's usually my preferred first typesetting option.
As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production, I expected much worse of Paged.js than I found. It's powerful and mostly enjoyable to use! Oh, you end up with a large set of CSS rules, and it is not without bugs and gotchas (failing to specify a bleed rule somewhere at least once in every @page context subtly breaks layout; footnote layout is functional but automatic call numbering isn't always perfect, etc.)
You should definitely not expect to take Paged.js out of the box, slap a theme on it, and go; it comes as a box of parts with a mostly complete machine inside, and if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. I imagine the publisher who uses it must have some prior interest in web technologies, for example.
Nor is Paged.js remotely as capable or flexible as InDesign or a comparable tool, especially for the deeply rudimentary condition of web typography overall - something even as elaborate a tool as this can't really approach fixing.
But Paged.js is also unlike InDesign in having a much shallower (days vs months) learning curve for folks like us with prior web experience, and however equivocal a review I may now be giving of its technical merits, I do actually like working with Paged.js quite a lot.