Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#2Typst is great. I'm sure it's not a complete LaTeX replacement, given the dominance of TeX for many decades, but for simple documents it's a breath of fresh air.
Not having to deal with the insanity of the LaTeX distribution system alone is worth the switch. Everything is contained in a single binary. The language itself is much simpler to read and write, and seems just as flexible. LLMs do a decent job of generating it. Compilation takes less than a second, making it so much faster to iterate.
Many thanks to the authors and contributors, and please don't ruin it. :)
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#3Assuming it's at all desirable, it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and notations.
Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.
Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources and so on.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#4Typst is fantastic and I recommend to dive into it to see how much value it offers. To me personally, the biggest strength is the ergonomics of both the tooling and the language, and how ergonomics persist even between documents of various complexity. Writing a paper in LaTeX is nice, but making something like a CV takes some patience. Meanwhile, in typst it was quick to get started and go all the way to building resumes, character sheets, and I know of at least one occurrence of implementing symbolic math in typst language. It's not without quirks, but still, very solid alternative
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#5Assuming it's at all desirable, it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and notations. Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar. Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources and so on.
> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.
I think it depends on what the thing is. I use LaTeX for occasional documentation, a better version would save me a maximum of 5 minutes a year. I probably won't be an early Typst adopter.
But, I spend loads of time for example, working with dataframes in Python. I got into Polars fairly early because improvements in that space can massively affect my productivity.
If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#6God it's so much easier than LaTeX. I wrote so many things in LaTeX over the years, and writing (and debugging) switching to Typst felt like, well, like somebody had been fighting me every step of the way, and then finally stopped. I'm not going back, if I can help it.
But I will say I've mostly written relatively simple documents in it, so maybe that colors my experience.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#7I just found out https://typst.app/play/ - this is an absolute gamechanger. Tried it for a minute, but already loving it.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#8Assuming it's at all desirable, it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and notations. Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar. Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources and so on.
See: YAML, JS, /etc structure, credit cards in US...
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#9I've tried pushing Typst on my academic friends. One of them listened and eventually wrote his entire PhD thesis with it. He didn't seem to regret it.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#10These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX:
1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.
2. Compiling is instant.
3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).
4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.
5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.
6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.
7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.