231–240 of 338 posts
I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly. Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.
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> 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'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?
There are already at least two publishers which accept Typst. So that "ever" part is already covered. But most still don't accept Typst and LaTeX is usually mandatory if the sources are required.
I don't use latex anymore and I don't have a use case for typst, so I'm not currently using it, but I follow the advancements from time to time, and I have to disagree with the advisor.
Typst is perfectly fine for replacing latex in almost any place that doesn't require the latex source. The other case is because tthe ecosystem is much smaller so if you need a specific extension that does not exist or is not trivial to implement you'll be out of luck, and you'll be stuck with latex.
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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.
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.
>In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No. Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on handsomely. Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down the line it is possible that maintained forks will be controlled by big publishers pa…
Unless academia collapses.
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I'm not familiar with how journal submissions work, but don't you simply submit a pdf at the end? Does it matter what engine you used to render it?
You normally submit a LaTeX or Word document, and the publisher does the final typesetting. Even in computer science, where people often spend a lot of time tweaking the typesetting, the pdf generated by the authors is essentially a preview. There are often visible differences between it and the publisher's version.
Journals justify their fees by claiming its for typesetting, but all they are really doing is adding extra work to nit pick bibliography formats and so on (see the comments in this article about sentence case). Nobody cares about that. I don't think anyone even reads "journals" any more (except maybe Nature/Science etc.). They mostly just read individual papers and then there's no consistency to maintain.
In a sane world journals would accept PDFs. They would check that the format roughly matches what they expect but not insist on doing the type setting themselves.
Oh well, maybe one day.
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.
Regarding point 1: I'm so glad they didn't keep the math syntax, there's finally progress in math text input! E.g. we can now write $ ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1, ... } \ QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ } $ $ a = cases( 0 & quad x 0 ) $ instead of \begin{align*} \mathbb{Z} &= \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\ \mathbb{Q} &= \left\{ \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\} \end{align*} \[ a = \begin{cases} 0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\ \…
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.
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? Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.
Accessibility is just as important as “the real work”.