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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

fransskarman.com

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Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#31

Post by wyager »

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?

Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste.

Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#32

Post by nextos »

pcfwik wrote: post #7
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy…

LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints.

Latexmk is one way to address this problem. A good IDE like AUCTeX can also figure out how many times the compiler should be invoked.

Good IDEs will also provide other invaluable assistance, like SyncTeX (jumping from source to exact point at PDF, and back).

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#33

Post by blindstitch »

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.

The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#34

Post by vessenes »

I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine has some additional vertical control for long documents that latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Maybe in another year or six months!

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#35

Post by pdpi »

wenc wrote: post #27
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 desig…

> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look plain good.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#36

Post by [deleted] »

andrepd wrote: post #14
nomel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point. [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/

I'll only say that learning typst is easier than learning LaTeX. It also has first class support for unicode (as does LaTeX via some packages) which if combined with a suitable keyboard layout makes both writing and reading math source code infinitely more pleasant :)

[deleted]

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#37

Post by TimorousBestie »

wenc wrote: post #30
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. Cla…

Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package development time. Now they also have to compete with the millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#38

Post by TimorousBestie »

wenc wrote: post #27
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 desig…

Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#39

Post by dkga »

Nice debrief. I think tough some of the downsides the author mentions can be addressed relatively easily with quarto, which has embraces Typst since its early days as I recall. Especially the bibliography issue.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#40

Post by shrinks99 »

Very cool! I ran into the multiple bibliography issue when attempting to typeset my grandmother's PHD thesis which I was able to rescue from the 5.25" floppies it was originally stored on. I was planning on waiting until they solved this officially to resume that side project, but might give Alexandria a shot!
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