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

111–120 of 338 posts

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#111

Post by justinnk »

dleslie wrote: post #86
the-wumpus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source. Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally. I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0…

They have a deep incentive to drive users to subscribe, and that's directly at odds with keeping all of the document rendering open source. It makes a lot of sense for them to provide document features that are only available to subscribers.

What you suggest seems plausible, but there is a very good counter example. Overleaf is also managing well by relying on the open-source LaTEX. What drives people to subscribe is not the typesetting itself, but the ecosystem around it (collaborative editing, version management, easy sharing, etc.). You can make money with those and still have the rendering free/open-source. I believe a similar thing is/will be true for Typst as well.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#112

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> 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 always feel like I’m doing something wrong when I have to deal with LaTeX and lose hours to fighting with the tooling. Even with a clean install on a new machine it feels like something fails to work.

The last time I had to change a document I had to go through what felt like 100 different search results of people with the same issue before I found one where there was a resolution and it was completely obscure. I tried to help out by reposting the answer to a couple other locations, but I was so exhausted that I swore off LaTeX for any future work unless absolutely unavoidable.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#113

Post by __m »

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 like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#114

Post by jeffparsons »

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.

Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad), and then back into a brand new Word document.

This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for the nerves.

Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into LaTeX's trap. :)

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#115

Post by aitchnyu »

Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#116

Post by oefrha »

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.

Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results (however minor). Actual research doesn’t. It’s the classic feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly productive activities like typesetting.

I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#117

Post by volemo »

bee_rider wrote: post #106
generationP wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed theorems or fancy headings.

Tikz is sometimes useful, but it can also be a massive time sucking pain in the butt. I mean it is one of the few packages that can actually manage to annoy LaTeX fans, which is really saying something.

I think the annoyance with TikZ is twofold: (1) it tries to do a really hard thing (create a picture with text in a human writable way), (2) it is used infrequently enough that it’s hard to learn through occasional use.

That said, nobody makes you use TikZ, fire up Inkscape and do it wysiwyg.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#119

Post by Cordiali »

nextos wrote: post #61
__float wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, I don't like creeks like in your last example. But I absolutely prefer paragraphs, where the final line would be considered 'too short'. It also makes an appreciable impact for me, in how easy a text is to read.

Which is to say, half of these things are pretty subjective.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#120

Post by lblume »

aitchnyu wrote: post #115

Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.

I have so far not been able to get a major LLM to generate fully functional Typst code, no matter how much context I try to put into it. The models do not seem to currently understand Typst's concept of modes (code, markup and math) and especially in code mode suffers from heavy hallucination of syntax and/or semantics.
Post reply on HN