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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

#61

Post by nextos »

__float wrote: post #48
nextos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and excessive end-of-line hyphenation.

It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better explanation and an example.

IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without microtypography texts look ugly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Progr...

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#62

Post by fluidcruft »

pdpi wrote: post #35
wenc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

I don't know if this is still the case or not but equations in Word can be upgraded to MathType. IIRC the Word equations were a basic version of MathType (i.e. developed by the same people). MathType included latex syntax and much better layout and formatting. It was the only way to stay sane when working on journal articles with collaborators who gave less than zero interest in latex (i.e. physicians).

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#63

Post by smaudet »

shermantanktop wrote: post #55
wyager wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ju…

I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. Probably. It’s the sort of ritual humiliation that academia specializes in.

I'm not sure that it is as much about ritual humiliation as much as that, well, you are supposed to be at some sort of summit, so you must have refined your process.

A mountain hiker can wear whatever, but above a certain altitude something must be true of them (fit, trained well, holding various gear, has supplies, or is in a plane/heli and probably even better trained/equipped/fit).

I would hope that typesetting is just a qualia of an ordered mind not a goal of it.

You can choose to feel "humiliated", but the truth should be closer to that you may simply be inadequate in that regard.

I.e. it is not that using LaTeX (or even Typst) makes you a better person, just that certain types of people will tend to use tools, like mountain climbers likely use carabiners.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#64

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

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?

Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX.

Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful.

Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#65

Post by nextos »

catgary wrote: post #50
nextos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progr…

> Integrating some actual programming features could be a game changer.

LuaTeX already lets you embed Lua code and it is really good.

However, I do agree some usability improvements are needed.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#66

Post by smaudet »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #37
wenc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great for code re-use but I agree, terrible for anything new.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#67

Post by roshdodd »

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.

A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git.

Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually.

As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#68

Post by tom_ »

shusaku wrote: post #5
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…

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

My makefiles ran it 4 times, i think. I still preferred it to Word.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#69

Post by coliveira »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #37
wenc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is good, because we don't want to deal with inferior solutions to typesetting that pop up every few years.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#70

Post by com2kid »

fluidcruft wrote: post #62
pdpi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, b…

I don't know if this is still the case or not but equations in Word can be upgraded to MathType. IIRC the Word equations were a basic version of MathType (i.e. developed by the same people). MathType included latex syntax and much better layout and formatting. It was the only way to stay sane when working on journal articles with collaborators who gave less than zero interest in latex (i.e. physicians).

The equation editor in Word straight up supports LaTeX now days. It also supports UnicodeMath, which is an actual standard and a pretty cool one at that. Sadly it has almost no adoption outside of Word.
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