Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 390 posts

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#231

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

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?

That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis in LaTeX. I have done many detailed figures in TikZ and done countless presentations using Beamer.

I have no idea how to implement anything in TeX on my own besides rudimentary macros. I did once try to implement a simple typesetting package for typesetting some particularly gnarly natural deduction trees, and I thought it worked fine for a few examples, but then it broke down in ways that was completely non-obvious to me.

The computational model of TeX is really, really opaque to me.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#232

Post by cruffle_duffle »

Retr0id wrote: post #199
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?

I used to use LaTeX pretty frequently and although I was reasonably productive I also never felt that I "knew" it. It was a whole lot of googling "how to do x in latex" and pasting in something that was too arcane for me to remember for next time (and/or copy pasting from my own prior documents) In all honesty, I only ever did it to achieve the "LaTeX look". These days I write in markdown or (gasp) wysiwyg editors li…

Thanks to pervasive use of LLMs I predict the future is mostly markdown. It’s the defacto output format for every LLM. It’s simple, plaintext and easy to version control.

Hell I wish I could submit my resume as markdown.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#233

Post by analog31 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #222
analog31 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also brought typesetting to academic research, which means it's doing something that wasn't necessary before it arrived. I was one of the last holdouts from a bygone era. I finished my dissertation in physics, in 1993. It's neither typeset, nor even in a computer readable form. Some fellow students were already using LaTeX by that point (mostly high energy physics, the slowest to graduate of the physics specialtie…

You wrote an analog thesis about 31 years ago, analog31? You've been playing the long game with this account! Appreciate the story, thanks for sharing. Can I ask what your thesis was on (in whatever way isn't too personally-identifying if that's a concern)?

I anticipated this moment. ;-)

It was at a time of extremely rapid development of laser technology, where you built your own lasers to be at the cutting edge, which meant optics, electronics, and in my case, computer control plus data collection. I developed a method of increasing the signal-to-noise for a class of spectroscopy measurements by a factor of roughly 1000. This opened up a number of possible experiments involving otherwise weak effects.

My experiment produced some token physics results, but the method that I developed was really the point of it. A couple other labs used my setup, substituting more modern lasers as they became available. Meanwhile, I went into industry, and still work on measurement instrumentation today.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#234

Post by ktosobcy »

aeve890 wrote: post #194
bryanhogan wrote: post #177

I had originally dismissed Typst, since at first glance it seemed like some closed online-only tool. But actually there's solutions such as Typstify[1] which works offline, haven't tried it yet but seemed promising. [1]: https://typstify.com/

Typst is open source. It can be used as a cli tool https://github.com/typst/typst

Is the format "open" as well?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#235

Post by locao »

My first thought was "why would anyone want to ditch LaTeX?". But it's been almost 20 years I left academy, so I knew I would be missing something.

Reading the comments reminded me of the pain.

I didn't see anyone mentioning, maybe it was me "holding it wrong", but boy what have I done to get proper references. After a year or so writing articles I had an unfailing process to get them right, but whenever I tried to explain it to my colleagues I heard "yeah, ok, I'm staying in MS Word".

I also did a pixel-perfect template for my university. As a programmer, I never felt so ashamed of sharing something. I felt like it would be selfish to keep it to myself, so I did it, but it almost physically hurt me. After 10 years people stopped emailing me asking for help. Maybe they fixed the template or just ditched LaTeX at all.

As I'm planning to get back to academy next year, it was good to learn about Typist.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#236

Post by xvilka »

There is still continued work on LaTeX3[1][2], but it took so long without any release[3], by this time not sure if it will get adopted.

[1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/

[2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3

[3] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/572113/whats-the-cur...

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#237

Post by anta40 »

robert-zaremba wrote: post #60

TBH, I'm sick about LaTeX: - compilation is heavy - it's not friendly for writing (far from the dominant markup languages) - poor support to HTML / Epub / mobile outputs - output (PDF) not friendly for parsing / digesting. - tonnes of templates, lot of mess. We should just use human friendly markups like MyST Markdown [1] or Org Mode [2]. Unfortunately, whitepapers are predominantly written in LaTeX. Thankfully, arXi…

I'm pretty sure LaTeX can do all the documents I want to, e.g anything with complicated math expressions, various pseudocodes, computer science-y diagrams like karnaugh map, algorithm flowchart etc etc.

Of course, it's not all roses and sunshines, though. Depending on your usecases, usually need to import a few packages and sometimes they don't work out of the box easily.

For real life work I don't need that much power, though. But after learning various alternatives like markdown, asciidoctor etc etc eventually I go back to LaTeX. Oh well :p

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#238

Post by wildzzz »

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…

Maybe the best compromise here is a markdown interpreter that converts to latex so you can use existing libraries and templates but not have to worry as much about syntax.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#239

Post by throwaway_7274 »

analog31 wrote: post #233
throwaway_7274 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wrote an analog thesis about 31 years ago, analog31? You've been playing the long game with this account! Appreciate the story, thanks for sharing. Can I ask what your thesis was on (in whatever way isn't too personally-identifying if that's a concern)?

I anticipated this moment. ;-) It was at a time of extremely rapid development of laser technology, where you built your own lasers to be at the cutting edge, which meant optics, electronics, and in my case, computer control plus data collection. I developed a method of increasing the signal-to-noise for a class of spectroscopy measurements by a factor of roughly 1000. This opened up a number of possible experiments…

Good stuff, nothing but respect for that kind of work. AMO people are a different breed. Spending all day interpreting power spectral densities and tracking down ground loops takes a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Literally. Last time I used a microwave amplifier I plugged it in with the wrong polarity and blew it up!

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#240

Post by analog31 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #239
analog31 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anticipated this moment. ;-) It was at a time of extremely rapid development of laser technology, where you built your own lasers to be at the cutting edge, which meant optics, electronics, and in my case, computer control plus data collection. I developed a method of increasing the signal-to-noise for a class of spectroscopy measurements by a factor of roughly 1000. This opened up a number of possible experiments…

Good stuff, nothing but respect for that kind of work. AMO people are a different breed. Spending all day interpreting power spectral densities and tracking down ground loops takes a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Literally. Last time I used a microwave amplifier I plugged it in with the wrong polarity and blew it up!

It probably required negative power for some unexpected reason.

CMOS has spoiled us.

Post reply on HN