281–290 of 390 posts
From the article: "Typst... can, for example, easily split large tables across page breaks, something that LaTeX struggles with even with specialized packages." That would be nice. I remember when I first started working with LaTeX that I was surprised that I needed to decide ahead of time whether a table would fit on one page or not. If Typst can make that decision on its own, that's a step forward. One thing I have…
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If you're compiling millions of documents, many with thousands of pages, you probably need something very universal. LaTeX is boring tech, off the shelf, ready to use. It might take some work to figure out the initial setup with regards to templating and everything else, but after that, you can be generally pretty content that it will handle most things you throw at it just fine.
LaTeX is notoriously bad at being boring tech. It has a lot of very rough edges, especially when it comes to longer documents.
Personally I think ConTeXt is a far superior tool, though its documentation is always trailing quite a distance behind its current capabilities.
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…
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 suspect it is getting better but I've experienced some breaking changes with Typst. Nothing that was terribly difficult to fix, debugging it wasn't obvious though. There seems to be a huge amount of folks that want typst to work. I respect TeX and LaTeX, immensely, but it's so vast and byzantine. Maybe I don't know where or what, but some kind of clean LaTeX "distribution" is needed. It seems like you could build i…
Unfortunately it’s a bit like asking for a “clean” Python distribution or a “safe” subset of C++. All the baroque mess is necessary to get working the many legacy packages that many people depend upon. And not just depend upon, but depend upon with all their concomitant foibles, bugs, and learned work-arounds.
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 I'm not sure if you really mean pixel perfect or if it's just an exaggeration. There are packages in latex which are almost impossible to replicate in a pixel perfect way, one widely used example is microtype, which is especially useful in scientific works.
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…
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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.
Software should be invisible and not a hindrance to our ability to express ourselves.
It's my duty bring up that plain TeX, the Knuth language in which the large macro collection LaTeX is written, isn't as verbose and opaque as LaTeX when people complain about that. It has the opposite problem where you may have more control than you'd like. But it is in some sense very simple. e.g. this is a valid plain TeX document: $$\aleph_0$$ \bye Things don't have to begin{ and end{ etc. There are simple collect…
Anyone who has only ever used LaTeX will be pleasantly surprised by plain TeX - so many of the things that you'd think must be LaTeX macros are actually just TeX itself.
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I've said that in Typst, when you're writing, it feels like writing, and when you're programming, it feels like programming. Whereas LaTeX always feels almost, but not quite, entirely unlike programming.
The primary feeling I get from using LaTeX is: fear. Any little special thing I adjust tends to break the document, or move figures, or fixing one thing breaks another and so on. And forget about changing templates.