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I then discovered typst and it is a breath of fresh air. Unicode/Dēvanāgarī support out-of-the-box, no installing gigabytes of packages, near-instant compilation.
My complements to those who got this done.
Since 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?
You can also write a macro
#let csharp = [C\#]
And then use it as #csharp
The absolute staying power of TeX has been incredible.
I have written a couple of lecture notes in LaTeX and I wrote my master's thesis (mathematics) in LaTeX as well[1]. It's actually a fine language if all you want to do is write and rely on other people's templates. But actually writing my own package or understand how the underlying systems work has always seemed like black magic where individual packages have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, or add specific w…
Those goals fall way out of the scope of LaTeX (and of course of Typst). If you want to have more control and power into a document's design, there's ConTeXt - as a graphic designer I just love it and can't imagine myself replacing it with LaTeX or Typst.
But as you said, if you want to concentrate on writing your text without thinking too much about its design, LaTeX or Typst are great for that.
Assuming 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.
If the software is actually good, it can start from an enthusiastic core of students, PhD students and later niche conference organizers and niche journal editors and if they gossip about their experience, it can spread through word of mouth if it's sufficiently good.
Otherwise you become Dvorak, which despite being better than Qwerty and having been around for almost a hundred years, still hasn't seen widespread adoption, in this case because the awkwardness of switching is very significant. The effect is likely smaller on something like Typst.
I have written a couple of lecture notes in LaTeX and I wrote my master's thesis (mathematics) in LaTeX as well[1]. It's actually a fine language if all you want to do is write and rely on other people's templates. But actually writing my own package or understand how the underlying systems work has always seemed like black magic where individual packages have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, or add specific w…
I recently wrote a thesis in typst. I have written other thesis in latex.
In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex.
I don't need that for typst.
If typst can avoid enshittifaction over the next years, then I will stay with them.
These 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…
I must say I really like the more straightforward syntax, semantics, and distribution model of Typst. LaTeX is akin to programming with the C preprocessor, it's both ridiculous and amazing what people have done with it but it gets quickly intractable. However, I really do enjoy the quality of graphics, diagrammatic, and scientific output from LaTeX, even if typing them is a pain (LLMs are a huge help here). So asking…
Typst has a bibtex support by default [2].
[0] https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz [1] https://typst.app/universe/search/?kind=packages&category=vi... [2] https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/bibliography/