181–190 of 390 posts
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…
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> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Or could it be that the fact that LaTeX is a layer on top of TeX is a cause of additional complexity and that you still have to deal with TeX, so the abstraction is neither complete nor opaque? I assume in Typst they don't (yet) have this issue. Another reason could be missing static typing and thus less formal means to find bugs? You "missing abstractions" finding would point to that.
All these layers and alternatives have proliferated partly because of age and the necessity of new solutions to new problems. I also think they're partly coping with fundamental limitations, design decisions that seemed like (or very much were!) a good idea in 1978, that sort of thing.
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> Like other academics, I plan to stick with latex for journal articles and books, unless publishers provide support for typst. In my undergrad we sent all our essays etc as LaTeX and it was honestly very usable. I assume this was somewhat dependent on having a wealth of enthusiast professors and postgrads to develop the templates though...? Since then, I've used LaTeX in a "freeform" way and absolutely hated it, I w…
LaTeX absolutely shines when you have someone providing a template; hardly anything comes close. When you're on your own, you need to either steal someone else's and modify it, learn to build your own, or just use something like the Memoir package (which is the first but designed for it.) Even if you don't use LaTeX at all, "A Few Notes on Book Design" is worth the read: https://ctan.org/pkg/memdesign
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.
Typst on the other hand is completely sensible.
It takes less time to learn typst than to refresh on latex.
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.
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> 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...