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Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#331

Post by contrarian1234 »

afiori wrote: post #229
contrarian1234 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are formatting guidelines, I've never seen them so specific that you could only easily do it in Latex. Is that really common? I've never actually see it as the assumed default option.. Maybe a decade back I could see that.. but not now.

The matter isn't really that something is possible only in latex, but that a department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity that you would have to reimplement

> department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity

I think there is a limit to how complex they can be. If you can't do it relatively easily in Word, then it's probably going to create too many complaints for the bureaucrats

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#332

Post by didericis »

koito17 wrote: post #311
didericis wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably ignorant to specific issues that make more advanced typesetting for journal submissions necessary, but I don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the standard. I'd advocate for that before either LaTeX or Typst. I absolutely get the importance of typesetting for people who publish physical books/magazines/etc, but when it comes to research I don't see the value of typsetting anything.…

> I don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the standard I would argue that is exactly what LaTeX is... I studied mathematics in university, and from what I recall, every major publisher provided a LaTeX template for articles and textbooks. Likewise, pretty much every mathematics presentation uses Beamer slides, and most mathematicians are able to "compile" subsets of LaTeX in their head. Websites…

I agree the standard for mathematical notation is latex, but it’s only needed for fairly limited parts of a document. It makes more sense to me as something you’d use in snippets like `$\sum_{n=1}^{10}n$` than something that should control the whole document.

Markdown and mathjax is imo way more web friendly than a full latex document and avoids distracting/unnecessary aspects of latex.

As for publisher support, that’s what frustrates me most: html was specifically designed for academics at cern to publish and link documents. Instead of using an html friendly format like markdown, publishers demand a format designed for printing content to a physical piece of paper. So now html is used for almost everything except academic papers, and academic papers are all pdfs submitted to journal or preprint severs with no links.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#333

Post by grep_name »

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 might have to give it a try. There's a lot I like about the idea of latex but I've never been able to successfully internalize how to use it in a non-painful way either. I've pretty much given up on the whole idea of making a PDF do what I want at this point.

I've looked into typst before and am always turned off hugely by the website's attempt to make it look like some sort of purchased product with a freemium option. I don't really ever like to commit to anything I can't use with a basic commandline / plain text pipeline or that I don't expect to be available in a long-term way without enshittifying. Looking closer at the actual repo for the first time, it seems like I can use it that way, so it warrants investigation, but I'm still leery of the project because of its presentation

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#334

Post by Too »

Why do we need these special languages just to get adequate typesetting and kerning? In the end it’s just a paragraph of text constrained to a column. Because let’s be honest, this is why most people use LaTeX, not because they enjoy how to place a picture in a bullet list with cryptic syntax. Let’s ignore math for now.

Can’t the browser do this with HTML and CSS? From there you can go even further with standard tooling, generating from markdown.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#335

Post by tossandthrow »

isatty wrote: post #298
tossandthrow wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You footnote really describes why latex was not fine. I recently wrote a thesis in typst. I have written other thesis in latex. In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex. I don't need that for typst. If typst can avoid enshittifaction over the next years, then I will stay with them.

> In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex. Sure, but if you want to just _write_ then latex is just fine. I don’t understand why you had to write in markdown?

Because standard constructions like emphasize, code blocks, headers, lists etc. Are incredibly difficult to both read and write hampering the writing flow a lot.

Both markdown and typst solves this.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#337

Post by Gucio »

linsomniac wrote: post #175

Any experience with using Typst to produce "pixel perfect" reproductions of existing documents? At work we have a series of contracts that are updated every year, with fillable blanks that we fill in with provided data. We currently use latex for them and have a contractor is very good at making them look basically exactly like the original contracts, but at some point she's going to retire, probably sooner rather th…

What I tend to do to get the best result is setting the background of the typst document to the document I'm targeting, and then adjusting until it matches perfectly.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#338

Post by Myrmornis »

This looks amazing.

I made this WYSIWYG-ish LaTeX editing environment for Emacs which renders things in-line as you type: https://github.com/dandavison/xenops

Does anything like that exist for Typst? I.e. something where you edit the same document that is rendering, rather than exporting or side-by-side live preview?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#339

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

TheCondor wrote: post #226
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 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…

> some kind of clean LaTeX "distribution" is needed

I don't think a distro would do much to alleviate my gripes with (La)TeX which is its language and VM. TeX-the-language violates literally every single architectural principle we have come to rally around in sane programming languages. Whether you start by reading the TeX book or by copy-pasting from similar LaTeX documents, in my experience you'll soon hit a wall. No simple if/then/else. No just-works maths. No data types. No namespaces. No modularization. Every single solution in the language that Knuth comes up for any kind of problem he solved in TeX is a new edition of facepalm.jpg, everything you don't know and look up or (more likely) post to TeX StackExchange is answered with something that will make you stare in disbelief. Nothing, absolutely nothing that you do in the language to change anything in your document is guaranteed to not accidentally affect something else in your document, and your only way to check for it is eyeballing every single page of output.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#340

Post by fl0id »

The immediate no for scientific collaborations is zotero support being paid only. If it was just one user, sure they could decide to pay. But no way I am convincing others to sign up. (If this is somehow possible without paying while not ‚syncing‘ it’s not obvious)
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