I used it for a presentation. Easy for the basics but it felt like a down grade from Latex or TeXmacs
Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
11–20 of 390 posts
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#12Assuming 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...
Keyboards being modeled after typewriters, unit of electrical charge being negative, pi being half a turn, etc.
Our basis vectors are very much wide of the mark.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#13Among alternative typesetting systems, there is also SILE, which supports two syntaxes (XML-based and TeX-style), supports scripting in lua, comes with freely available sort-of-specification (unlike (La)TeX or Typst, unless one counts program sources as specification). For formulae, it additionally allows direct MathML input. I have not used either Typst or SILE though, only looked into their documentation.
HTML with MathML may make a decent system as well; possibly with an XML source and XSLT for templating, which is apparently how OpenStax textbooks are composed (via CNXML, though that also has just a couple of rain frog pictures in its documentation repository -- seems to be a common pattern around typesetting systems).
Then there is troff with eqn(1), which looks simpler, but not sure if there is an actual specification for it around, either.
And then there are Texinfo, org-mode with LaTeX embedding, other TeX-adjacent options, perhaps Markdown with HTML and MathML embedding.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#14Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#15Tinymist plugin in vscode is all you need to install, no giant amorphous TexLive thing needed for local editing.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#16Assuming 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…
> If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.
I don't know. By then aren't you quite comfortable with LaTeX?
It may be Stockholm syndrome and sunk costs speaking, but I'm using LaTeX all the time: I quite like it and I don't feel any need for something else to replace it...
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#17Since there are typist folks here, how do you work with hash and dollar signs?
If I want to write C# on my resume, I do C`#` but there has to be a better way?
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#18These 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 vi…
8. Programming with it is lovely. Its got a little interpreted language built in, with helper functions like json("some_file.json"). I wrote a paper in it, and used that extensively to populate all my result tables. (Benchmark script -> JSON files -> typst compiled the results directly into the PDF).
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#19Typst 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 res…
I maintained my CV in Latex for years (originally got started on this due to the fear of MS Word) and recently tried out Typst. I agree with you that it's quite simple to get started with. Also, I had to maintain a Ubuntu based Docker image with everything needed for the build.
Also if anyone is looking for a little help in getting started, LLMs are pretty decent at converting (and I forget which one I used).
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#20Assuming 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.
Yeah, I wrote a paper using typst - which was much more pleasant to draft. But for the final version submitted to the journal, we ended up converting it to latex because that's what the journal wanted.
I think it'll be hard to dislodge latex for academic papers - particularly in CS. But there's plenty of other uses for it. Personally I'm looking forward to HTML output. I want to use it to write blog posts and long form documentation. (Markdown simply isn't powerful enough for my needs.)