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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

fransskarman.com

131–140 of 338 posts

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried typst at least once. You have big words but it is lightyears better than Latex.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#134
post #75

In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part and implementing critical features in the closed source portion. Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.

On the flip side, new tools like Typst are trying to push the UX forward in ways that the LaTeX ecosystem often struggles with. I think it comes down to what risks you're comfortable with

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#135

AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are far more concise than LaTeX source. I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the right touch for working with AI on topological research and code. It…

Personally, I write for humans.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#136

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…

One of the things that really interests me about Typst is that the compile process seems much more deterministic and modern

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#137

AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are far more concise than LaTeX source. I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the right touch for working with AI on topological research and code. It…

The idea of publishing as an animation + Typst doc actually sounds pretty compelling… the old PDF format is starting to feel pretty stale

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#138

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 i…

Typst really does feel refreshing in that sense… way less fiddly and a lot more predictable, especially for layout tweaks

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#139
post #35
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…

Last time I checked, Word was also basically untenable for math-heavy writing because there was too much procedure involved in setting a formula. This is fine if you need one here and there, but if you have lots of formulas (including many tiny ones, like just using the name of a variable), switching to a dedicated formula mode in the interface is just not pleasant. In LaTeX (or Typst), I just type $, and off I go.
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