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Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#201

Post by lloydatkinson »

mr-karan wrote: post #72

It's great to see Typst getting more visibility. We migrated a real-world workload to it a couple of years back: generating and e-mailing 1.5M+ PDFs daily at my org, Zerodha. Our previous pipeline was LaTeX-based (first pdflatex, then lualatex), but we were constantly fighting cryptic memory errors on large documents and huge Docker image sizes that slowed down boot times of our ephemeral workers. Switching to Typst…

I’ve worked places that will regularly send generated PDFs of things like statistics or small reports or other generic boring business stuff every week or month.

It’s always been some combination of MJML, inline DIY HTML, or PDFs generated with Puppeteer etc.

Do you think Typst would be a good fit there too?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#202

Post by WastedCucumber »

chickenzzzzu wrote: post #181
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…

[flagged]

In my experience, formatting is just about the only thing that a department/university cares about (outside of the folks on the committee), and they will send back a thesis until they're satisfied with the formatting, and that means lost time. Perhaps throwaway_7274's department has a reputation for particular attention to (meaningless) detail.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#203

Post by analog31 »

fergie wrote: post #200
throwaway_7274 wrote: post #173

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…

> top-3 departement I’m curious- what does this mean?

It narrows things down to about 20 departments. ;-)

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#204

Post by throwaway_7274 »

fergie wrote: post #200
throwaway_7274 wrote: post #173

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…

> top-3 departement I’m curious- what does this mean?

Ugh, unfortunately it means "please note that I'm not an unserious person." Very often when you have opinions on software on the internet, trolls will jump out of the hedgerow and shout, "who are you to have an opinion?" And, sadly, that same sort of person will often be mollified somewhat by prestige.

Feels kind of icky to have written that, though, and maybe I regret it slightly.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#206

Post by chickenzzzzu »

WastedCucumber wrote: post #202
chickenzzzzu wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In my experience, formatting is just about the only thing that a department/university cares about (outside of the folks on the committee), and they will send back a thesis until they're satisfied with the formatting, and that means lost time. Perhaps throwaway_7274's department has a reputation for particular attention to (meaningless) detail.

[flagged]

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#207

Post by chickenzzzzu »

fathermarz wrote: post #195
chickenzzzzu wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you don’t understand what they mean and are hunting for pedantic discoveries in explanations of a problem, then please try to dig deeper and contribute more meaningfully, as per the HN guidelines.

[flagged]

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#208

Post by flokl »

notpushkin wrote: post #62
tcfhgj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Straight forward if you ask me: > /taɪpst/. "Ty" like in Typesetting and "pst" like in Hipster. https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#pronunciat...

Huh, I was reading it as “typist” all this time (and will probably continue).

I noticed quite a few people must do that because I have heard that pronunciation a few times already IRL and in videos. Some people also write it that way, a search here in the comments results in 4 matches.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#209

Post by ashton314 »

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…

Fellow PL grad student—not a top-3 tho ;)

I’ve looked at Typst and it looks attractive. I’m not quite willing to invest in it until, say, PACMPL lets me use it there. Any idea if that will happen any time soon?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#210

Post by hn-ifs »

I'm a masters student, I've gone with a quarto workflow. From quarto markdown to Word, little bit of VBA for tables and images, and to pdf from there if needed. Technically I could go straight to pdf, but not tried that yet.
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