Markdown is an awful choice - it has no definition, and it is difficult once you need something more complicated that a paragraph with a header (for example: a list with multi-paragraph items, forced line break etc).
Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
271–280 of 390 posts
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now, this isn't really an alternative, but I can recommend using pandoc instead of pure LaTex. Personally, I think text blocks are much easier to handle and read in markdown and pandoc allows you to use in-line LaTex wherever markdown is insufficient, without making basic text styling unnecessarily verbose. In my opinion, the result is a better/friendlier LaTex, or limitless markdown respectively. Especially for writ…
If you're going to do this, might as well go with AsciiDoc instead. It's vastly superior as a syntax. Markdown breaks down at the mere mention of something as trivial as a nested list item containing a table of blockquotes.
Not that it couldn’t be trivial in the abstract, but I’m struggling to imagine a use for a nested list item containing a table of blockquotes. It doesn’t seem at all surprising that a tool wouldn’t anticipate that.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#273The LaTeX community is astonishingly good at gatekeeping. I can't think of another field where the adoption of a clearly superior modern alternative has been so slow. For some reason, they seem to take pride in clinging to a 50-year-old typesetting system—with its bloated footprint, sluggish compilation, incomprehensible error messages, and a baroque syntax that nobody truly understands. People have simply learned just enough to make it work, and now they treat that fragile familiarity as a virtue.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#274The LaTeX community is astonishingly good at gatekeeping. I can't think of another field where the adoption of a clearly superior modern alternative has been so slow. For some reason, they seem to take pride in clinging to a 50-year-old typesetting system—with its bloated footprint, sluggish compilation, incomprehensible error messages, and a baroque syntax that nobody truly understands. People have simply learned ju…
The problem is that with Latex i end up in the same situation like in Word. I do not understand what is happenig and why.
Typst was an amazing addition to the modern IT stack. I use it whenever I can. The only issue is that companies like Google and Micrososft are dominating the collaboration space and I have zero chance to convince a comany to adopt Typst for internal documents that need to look good. It would be great though.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#275It'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.
Pandoc can do this [0], and there's also the "markdown" LaTeX package [1].
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#276It'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?
From experience, you don’t need to not have a CS background to find TeX/LaTeX difficult or obscure to customize or extend.
Here’s a challenge to try (I hacked together something similar that only works in specific cases): write an environment where you get N columns in portrait page mode, with a vertical ruler, say, 12pt to the left of each column; respecting different paper sizes.
The amount of \makeatother, and what does that even mean??, will blow your mind
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#277As a long time latex user, and one who is occasionally frustrated by usual things about latex, I have two qualms about attempting to switch to a new system. The first is I already have found solutions to many of my edge cases in latex. Will I have to do this all over again in something like Typst? It can't be so good as to not have any. And when I do encounter them, is the user base big enough to have already encount…
Typst still does not natively support floating images. You can put images at the top of a page, or at the bottom, but there is no native way to declare an image as floating with text wrapping around it.
“Natively” is important here because it’s actually relatively easy to get it working with a package: https://github.com/ntjess/wrap-it
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#278Don't forget other alternatives. On the pre-unicode side, we have lout http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/ . On the postmodern side, we have rakudoc https://raku.github.io/rakudoc .
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#279There 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...
LaTeX3 has either been cancelled or has already happened, depending on how you look at at. [0] But despite that, LaTeX is still continuously improving, although it will never beat Typst on speed or simpler markup.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst still does not natively support floating images. You can put images at the top of a page, or at the bottom, but there is no native way to declare an image as floating with text wrapping around it.
“Natively” is important here because it’s actually relatively easy to get it working with a package: https://github.com/ntjess/wrap-it
or meander, a recently released, more powerful package
https://typst.app/universe/package/meander