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Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#251

Post by afiori »

wildzzz wrote: post #238
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.

There are already good html to pdf solutions, people using latex generally would not be satisfied with those

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#253

Post by tkw01536 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #248
tkw01536 wrote: post #246

Like other commentators, I have worked with LaTeX for a long time (> 10 years) and have to say that it very much shows its age. For once, the compilation time is terrible - it can take several minutes to compile a typical document. I recently tried to create a poster for a conference - a single A0 page - and even this took more than a minute to compile. Because positioning in images and figures in LaTeX is not obviou…

Hey, I've had the same problem with duplicate citation keys! I couldn't find an issue on it. One of us should file a bug report.

I already did [1]. It got moved into hayagriva, which appears to be the library used to implement citation in typst.

[1] https://github.com/typst/hayagriva/issues/255

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#254

Post by coliveira »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #231
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?

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 deductio…

If you had opened and read the TeX book, you'd understand it.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#255

Post by ok123456 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #186
Rochus wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, absolutely, the sheer number of moving parts is related to this. There's TeX-the-language, there's LaTeX-the-format (a big layer of macros and conventions), the different LaTeX standards (LaTeX2ε, LaTeX3, whatever, I don't know the ins and outs). Then there's the implementation: all the different engines (pdftex, XeTeX, LuaTex), then there are the distributions , then there are build systems and wrapper scripts…

And the TeX that we know is the "new" TeX, which was created after Knuth completely rewrote the "old" TeX in 1983.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#256

Post by ok123456 »

throwaway_7274 wrote: post #204
fergie wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It also belies an ignorance that some schools have specializations. Utah wouldn't come to mind as a "top-20" school by the snobs, but they basically created computer graphics.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#257

Post by colonial »

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

There's also an LSP (Tinymist.) My Typst workflow is all local in VSCode, with the source markup in the left pane and a live preview on the right.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#258

Post by volemo »

coliveira wrote: post #254
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deductio…

If you had opened and read the TeX book, you'd understand it.

Oh, you mean those 500 pages of dense Knuth writing?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#259

Post by yodaDrofnats »

lupire wrote: post #93
repeekad wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is what you’re describing something that latex handles well? I’m no expert, but that problem seems solvable by rendering previews with say sampling of large or complex objects vs full builds that maybe take a minute if high fidelity animations or very large graphs are desired as a supported use case in something fully open source

LaTeX comping/rendering is generally extremely slow.

TeX is slow?!

Writing and editing an entire book manuscript is slow.

For pesky TeX chaos smashups, you create a small dedicated TeX file with necessary driver files, edit-compile-loop till satisfied.

Twenty years ago I ran a makefile producing 1755 pages on a 32 bit INTeL CPU. This was just to see what a fat book would look like, thousands of edits remained, still remain. All the two-column formatting was fine, except for problems of long equations and tables blowing up beyond the column, and other mess I couldn't solve. The compile run time was insignificant.

BTW its laTeX not LaTeX.

Donald Knuth's original creation will ever be infinitely more significant than the sprawling ocean of all the crumpled paper bag shenanigans Leslie and whomever-ephemeral else, RUSTy-paper-clips to the side.

De Laude Scriptorum

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#260

Post by specproc »

renerick wrote: post #4

Typst is fantastic and I recommend to dive into it to see how much value it offers. To me personally, the biggest strength is the ergonomics of both the tooling and the language, and how ergonomics persist even between documents of various complexity. Writing a paper in LaTeX is nice, but making something like a CV takes some patience. Meanwhile, in typst it was quick to get started and go all the way to building res…

All I've done in Typst is my CV, I saw it here a while back and thought it'd be a nice use case.

It took about a day to get my head round the language an another to get it looking like I wanted. It's pretty simple, but I found it easy to run up and maintain.

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