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

41–50 of 338 posts

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#41

Post by dkga »

vessenes wrote: post #34

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. Ma…

Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#42

Post by dkga »

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.

Well you can always diff the document. If it's not too large, then manually inspect it. If too long, then pipe the diff into the clipboard and send it to another LLM to summarise the changes.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#43

Post by commandersaki »

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.

These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX:

1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.

2. Compiling is instant.

3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).

4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.

5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.

6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#44

Post by api »

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…

Given that LLMs can or soon will be able to turn markdown or word into LaTeX this filter won’t last long.

It’s a dumb filter anyway.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#45

Post by senkora »

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…

There’s always the WordTex template if you want to create documents that look like LaTeX output from within Word: https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#46

Post by unbelievr »

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.

Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other interested parties and they're all given the book.

Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc. So you really, really want it to look right at the first go.

There's been some progress the past few years now where you get to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#47

Post by porcoda »

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.

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros.

I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#48

Post by __float »

nextos wrote: post #29
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.

What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#49

Post by RheingoldRiver »

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 was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.)

And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#50

Post by catgary »

nextos wrote: post #29
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.

I’m going to have to disagree with you there. The compile times are long, the error messages are worse than useless, and tikz diagrams are almost always unreadable messes.

Large swathes of mathematics, computer science, and physics involve notations and diagrams that are genuinely hard to typeset, and incredibly repetitive and hard to read if you don’t make heavy use of the macro system. Integrating some actual programming features could be a game changer.

Post reply on HN