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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

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Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#151

Post by agubelu »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #105
moelf wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For now, that's the entire collaboration component. And LaTeX has this for free? It's separated concerns, I think the analogy is Overleaf and LaTeX but just happened to be made by the same group of folks, it doesn't have to go down the monetization-at-the-cost-of-your-user route.

> And LaTeX has this for free? Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host, but it's missing quite a few features from the paid version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted version for collaboration. [0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans [1] https://github.com/overleaf/ove…

Actually I've never understood the "free-as-in-beer" thing. Where is beer free?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#152

Post by Paapaa »

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.

Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#153

Post by Paapaa »

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.

Typst does already support some microtype fetures out of the box and more are coming: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6161

I'd also not overemphasize the significance of microtype features. They might help with narrow columns but on wider columnds the difference is very small and most people will never notice them at all.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#154

Post by StefanBatory »

bjourne wrote: post #59
TimorousBestie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.

That may be true in US universities, but in Europe students have to write technical reports in almost every course.

Not really for me in Poland - thesis was the only thing we had to write in a technical way.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#155

Post by pedvide »

agubelu wrote: post #151
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And LaTeX has this for free? Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host, but it's missing quite a few features from the paid version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted version for collaboration. [0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans [1] https://github.com/overleaf/ove…

Actually I've never understood the "free-as-in-beer" thing. Where is beer free?

I've always understood "free as in beer" as: if someone hands you a beer and says it's free, you know that you don't have to pay to consume the beer, but that doesn't mean that you also get the recipe, brewing instructions, factory plans, glass making instructions etc. The only thing that is free is the liquid itself, nothing else.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#156

Post by mr_mitm »

agubelu wrote: post #151
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And LaTeX has this for free? Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host, but it's missing quite a few features from the paid version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted version for collaboration. [0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans [1] https://github.com/overleaf/ove…

Actually I've never understood the "free-as-in-beer" thing. Where is beer free?

The term was arguably coined by RMS and his full statement was:

> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Sometimes beer happens to be free, in which case it is referred to as "free beer". It's just an example.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#157

Post by fc417fc802 »

lblume wrote: post #124
coliveira wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A slight bias in favor of the status quo might be acceptable or even desired. However current LLMs strongly favor traditional languages and are unable to comprehend even modern language features not part of their base training set. Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could…

> Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently.

I'm not actually sure that would be a bad thing? All the reasons that immediately come to mind to move away from C have to do with ergonomics and safety, the latter largely being a product of the former IMO. If an LLM can ingest my entire codebase and do 90% of the work to get me to the changes I need doesn't that obviate the majority of the motivation to change languages in the first place?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#158

Post by meehai »

Paapaa wrote: post #152
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.

Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf hm ?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#159

Post by Beprons »

Sharlin wrote: post #78
bjourne wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true in US universities, but in Europe students have to write technical reports in almost every course.

That’s a pretty sweeping generalization. In the European university that I went to, CS students definitely didn’t have to write anything longer than long-form exam questions until the bachelor’s thesis.

[dead]

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#160

Post by diffeomorphism »

justinnk wrote: post #111
dleslie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

That is a bad counterexample. There is a world of difference between the main devs offering a paid service and some unaffiliated company offering services.

In principle, having a reliable source of funding for typst is great. However, as a journal this would make me hesitant: what if down the road some essential features become subscription-only?

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