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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

#141

Post by noelwelsh »

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.

I've done some simple Typst programming via Claude, and it worked fine. I expected it to be ignorant of Typst but that was not the case.

One of the best things about Typst is that most tasks are very simple. Compared to the reams of Latex BS I was replacing, building my book with Typst is momumentally simpler.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#142

Post by blitzar »

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 does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting?

I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#143

Post by mayli »

dleslie wrote: 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.

Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex generated PDFs.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#144

Post by msravi »

I have only two peeves with typst.

1. They should have carried forward the latex standard as-is for math, instead of getting rid of the backslash escape sequence, etc.

2. There is no way to share a variable across a file's scope - so can't have a setting that is shared across files - not even with state variables.

Other than this, typst is solid, and with the neovim editor and tinymist lsp, is great to write with.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#145

Post by diffeomorphism »

mayli wrote: post #143
dleslie wrote: 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.

Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex generated PDFs.

Yes, obviously. Do you delete all source code once you compiled a binary?

Any future corrections, additions or other modifications are made to the source, not the generated old pdf.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#146

Post by eunos »

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.

When I was in college I found out that I have better reading experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer to read Springer published reference books rather than class recommended books.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#147

Post by mr_mitm »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #145
mayli wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex generated PDFs.

Yes, obviously. Do you delete all source code once you compiled a binary? Any future corrections, additions or other modifications are made to the source, not the generated old pdf.

LaTeX is not as stable as people make it out to be.

I don't know how many packages there are for working with tables, but 20 years ago, `tabu` was the most recommended package, until the maintainer stopped responding. Now the package is incompatible with almost everything else, leading to headaches when trying to compile old documents:

https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/470107/incompatibili...

Typst at least has dependency pinning out of the box. If you value reproducibility, you should invent a similar mechanism for your LaTeX documents.

Also, I'm loosely following the activities around LaTeX on Github and Stackexchange and it seems that it's mostly maintained by three people or so (Carlisle, Mittelbach, Fischer), who - no offense - aren't getting any younger. I wonder how well LaTeX will be maintained if these long time contributors have to step down eventually.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#148

Post by _Algernon_ »

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.

For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly.

Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better.

And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#149

Post by electroly »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #148
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.

For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly. Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better. And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).

In Word, set the paragraph alignment to justified and enable automatic hyphenation.

You can actually use LaTeX math notation in the equation editor in modern Word.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#150

Post by Paapaa »

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #140

Is Typst’s typesetting quality on par with « bare » LaTeX ? with LaTeX + microtype ? It may be stupid and vain but for me if it doesn’t at least match the former it’s a no-go

Yes, it uses a very similar algorith as LaTeX. It also incorporates already some microtype features out of the box. So the typesetting quality is very good and easily comparable to LaTeX. Working with Typst is so much easier and faster than with LaTeX so you will be more productive. Many things can be done without resorting to external packages and scripting is a breeze compared to LaTeX.

Just try it out. It is free, open source and very easy to setup. Just install the extension Tinymist on VSCode, that is all you need.

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