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Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#171

Post by tialaramex »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #74
einpoklum wrote: post #69

Typst seems to be the product of a commercial company - fully controlled by it. That's not appropriate as a foundation for document authoring by "the public". I am also worried about the rust-centricity, seeing how rust is somewhat of a moving target.

What do you mean the rust-centricity?

Some people have this weird idea that because Rust ships new versions very often (every six weeks, like a web browser) this means it's unstable. They see rust 1.90 and they're like "Oh no, that's dozens of incompatible versions" rather than "Wow, over ten years of commitment to compatibility".

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#172

Post by Rochus »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #161

It's night and day. I'm a PhD student currently writing my thesis in Typst. On paper this is an absurdly risky decision: it's a new technology without a huge user-base, it's not totally stable yet, etc. But I tried Typst and I had no choice. It was obviously the right thing to do, even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone of my university's LaTeX template. I've been using LaTeX for over ten years an…

> I've been using LaTeX for over ten years and I still wouldn't say that I "know" TeX in any meaningful way. I was not only productive but proficient in Typst in a day or two.

That's an interesting insight. Do you have an idea why this is? Do you have a CS background?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#173

Post by throwaway_7274 »

Rochus wrote: post #172
throwaway_7274 wrote: post #161

It's night and day. I'm a PhD student currently writing my thesis in Typst. On paper this is an absurdly risky decision: it's a new technology without a huge user-base, it's not totally stable yet, etc. But I tried Typst and I had no choice. It was obviously the right thing to do, even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone of my university's LaTeX template. I've been using LaTeX for over ten years an…

> I've been using LaTeX for over ten years and I still wouldn't say that I "know" TeX in any meaningful way. I was not only productive but proficient in Typst in a day or two. That's an interesting insight. Do you have an idea why this is? Do you have a CS background?

Yep, I'm a CS researcher in a top-3 department. (Hate to be all credentialist like that, but I'm guessing it does mean something to this audience.)

I think a lot of the reason is that, ok, LaTeX is extremely complicated. We all know this. Its partisans tend to believe that this is because typesetting is a hard problem. Typesetting is a hard problem! We know this, too. But I think that a substantial fraction of the complexity of LaTeX is accidental complexity stemming, ultimately, from the inherently loosey-goosey nature of the system.

See, there is no real abstraction in TeX. There are no real mechanisms for encapsulation/information hiding/whatever. It's all just characters that eat characters and turn into other characters. Anything can do anything. Anything can be anything. As a result, the whole "theory" of what a TeX program "is" (like in the sense that Peter Naur used that word?) is conventional.

This means that even to reuse other people's code, you have to imbibe decades of convention that's maybe semi-documented, maybe folkloric, or maybe perfectly sound but requires you to read a 230-page manual. I can only speak for myself, but for me, it's no way to live.

Now, again, TeX-lovers tend to claim that its high degree of loosey-gooseyness is necessary, that it's what makes TeX "powerful." I don't know, that sounds to me like the same old "you can't handle writing assembly" story. Sure I can. I'd just rather not if I can help it.

Maybe it's the PL person in me.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#174

Post by p4bl0 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #161

It's night and day. I'm a PhD student currently writing my thesis in Typst. On paper this is an absurdly risky decision: it's a new technology without a huge user-base, it's not totally stable yet, etc. But I tried Typst and I had no choice. It was obviously the right thing to do, even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone of my university's LaTeX template. I've been using LaTeX for over ten years an…

> even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone of my university's LaTeX template

That's lucky. Most of us had to do a LaTeX pixel perfect clone of our university's MS Word template.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#175

Post by linsomniac »

Any experience with using Typst to produce "pixel perfect" reproductions of existing documents? At work we have a series of contracts that are updated every year, with fillable blanks that we fill in with provided data. We currently use latex for them and have a contractor is very good at making them look basically exactly like the original contracts, but at some point she's going to retire, probably sooner rather than later.

Probably our best solution is to decide that we don't care about nearly pixel perfect reproduction of the contract, which probably makes a switch to typst a lot easier.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#176

Post by ossner »

The crucial component for the success of this, in my opinion, is the acceptance of Typst templates in scientific journals and conferences. The adoption of something like this in universities relies entirely on the adoption by these publishers.

I see almost no support in the scientific community for Typst since everyone already has a LaTeX template for a thesis, paper, slides, etc. Researchers need to take the initiative and create a template that is accepted by first a chair, then propagate it in the university and try and get it popular enough so that it hopefully forces the creation of templates for conferences and journals.

This is an incredibly long, tedious, (and I am guessing ongoing) process, but one that is crucial for Typst to be a real contender with LaTeX

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#178

Post by henrebotha »

xigoi wrote: post #104
lupire wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your use case, why were you using LaTeX in the first place? That is more surprising than finding a replacement for LaTeX.

What else would you use to generate PDFs from a text-based template?

Asciidoctor?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#179

Post by jfengel »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #173
Rochus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using LaTeX for over ten years and I still wouldn't say that I "know" TeX in any meaningful way. I was not only productive but proficient in Typst in a day or two. That's an interesting insight. Do you have an idea why this is? Do you have a CS background?

Yep, I'm a CS researcher in a top-3 department. (Hate to be all credentialist like that, but I'm guessing it does mean something to this audience.) I think a lot of the reason is that, ok, LaTeX is extremely complicated. We all know this. Its partisans tend to believe that this is because typesetting is a hard problem. Typesetting is a hard problem! We know this, too. But I think that a substantial fraction of the co…

TeX had many design goals. "Being a good programming language" was not one of them.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#180

Post by perlgeek »

Long term Latex user here, I've been working on generating automatic invoices in Typst for a year now.

On the plus side:

* Getting structured data into typst is sooo much simpler than into latex. For latex, you basically have to render a template, and have to know all the crazy escaping rules for special characters. In typst, you can just read a json file, and do the rendering in typst.

* Super fast. Love it.

* Mostly very easy to use.

Minus:

* Our invoices are structured as multi-page tables, and widow and orphan prevention in a multi-page table seems to be non-existent. The workarounds we tried were too disruptive (lead to text overlapping other text, for example).

* There's a bug in the Python wrapper that means we sometimes don't get a proper error message when there happens to be an error, then we have to recreate the scenario on the command line to find out what the error was.

* Docs could be better (but are mostly OK)

Overall I'm very happy with typst for this use case.

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