Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

fransskarman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 338 posts

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#21

Post by andrepd »

Svoka wrote: post #3

I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo. Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.

Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality typesetting with an emphasis on maths.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#22

Post by JadeNB »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #15
Svoka wrote: post #3

I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo. Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.

It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell. I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current n…

XeTeX handles Unicode fine, but that's definitely one area where TeX shows its age and its extensibility didn't, I think, allow Lamport to make a real difference.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#23

Post by Swizec »

shermantanktop wrote: post #16

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#24

Post by aziis98 »

RestartKernel wrote: post #13
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #11

Pro tips: type long content unformatted, or barely formatted, then ask an LLM to format it using your markup of choice, then clean up the thing it got wrong. They are very decent at inferring the context of stuff and will mark code, maths, titles so on farely decently. This lets you focus on the work of making it looks nice.

I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.

I successfully converted a typst report to md/mdx last week using this technique. For complex layout primitives I just told the llm to write a comment with a warning todo of the missing part it wasn't able to convert

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#25

Post by pityJuke »

Glad to hear Typst has people doing serious work with it.

I’ve been able to avoid LaTeX. At uni, I went for org-mode -> LaTeX, which was OK except when my .emacs file was filling up with LaTeX stuff to make random stuff work. To be honest, that means I probably can’t even compile it again if I wanted to.

Typst has been awesome (always ran into LaTeX just being horribly inconsistent when layout stuff) when I’ve used it. Hope it continues.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#26

Post by thomasfedb »

shermantanktop wrote: post #16

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#27

Post by wenc »

shermantanktop wrote: post #16

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#28

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

JadeNB wrote: post #22
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell. I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current n…

XeTeX handles Unicode fine, but that's definitely one area where TeX shows its age and its extensibility didn't, I think, allow Lamport to make a real difference.

I have heard about it, but it isn't viable for me to switch to it because most academic journals and conferences have templates incompatible with XeTeX, or directly ask for the sources and compile them with pdflatex.

This is the same reason why it isn't viable for me to switch to typst either, by the way. I hope it gains popularity and ends up as a standard displacing (or along with) pdflatex.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#29

Post by nextos »

shermantanktop wrote: post #16

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.

Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#30

Post by wenc »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #6

I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly. Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.

Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code.

I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff.

Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.

Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.

Post reply on HN