Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Maybe I don't know where or what, but some kind of clean LaTeX "distribution" is needed. 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.
Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
341–350 of 390 posts
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#342Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#343Earlier 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.
I am the proud owner of all 5 five volumes and Digital Typography. I have been in front of a computer for almost every single day for around 45 years. I speak and write several languages, including Chinese and Japanese. I am regularly coding in several programming languages and consider myself fairly fluent in things like HTML and CSS. I have worked as a typesetter and assistant editor of two medical periodicals.
I could go on but what else in the world do I have to add to that so I can say "as for me, I opened the TeX book, read it, and understood it" or "I know how to use LaTeX, confidently"?
I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know the answer to the question "is TeX / LaTeX a well-designed, user-friendly, sane software?". The answer is no, no, and no.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#344It'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…
> If there isn't a package for something that I need (and, surprisingly often, there are packages for what I need, and excellent ones!), I find that I can just do it myself. Quickly.
(Serious question) With or without an LLM?
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
8. Programming with it is lovely. Its got a little interpreted language built in, with helper functions like json("some_file.json"). I wrote a paper in it, and used that extensively to populate all my result tables. (Benchmark script -> JSON files -> typst compiled the results directly into the PDF).
As you wrote a paper, how difficult would you say is it to recreate the template of the venue you submitted to?
95% of the layout? Trivial. The last 5%? Much harder. They’ve invested in their very specific latex template.
We probably could have done it but my coauthor is great with latex and figured converting the whole thing was probably easier than dealing with the political headache of making the organisers deal with a different format.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#346Is typst prefect, of course not, but it's good enough for most people. LaTeX on the other hand is the primary example where perfect is the enemy of the good.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#347It is amazing to see a modern take on LaTeX.
Previously I had great success with LyX (https://www.lyx.org/), which builds on top of LaTeX. The experience of typesetting beamer slides with it is relatively user-friendly.
A decent usage example of Typst is https://rendercv.com/. It is a set of Typst templates to build resumés.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#348It'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…
> If there isn't a package for something that I need (and, surprisingly often, there are packages for what I need, and excellent ones!), I find that I can just do it myself. Quickly. (Serious question) With or without an LLM?
GPT 5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro are usually unable to write compiling Typst code, getting it confused with Markdown. Claude Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4 manage to produce compiling Typst code more often than not, but is far from being able to follow instructions.
I assume there is just next to no Typst code on the internet as of their training and the similarities to MD + MathJax result in LLMs hallucinating Typst syntax, often using `#` for headings or `\` and `{ ... }` in math mode.
Therefore, I must say that LLMs are more of a hindrance than help when writing Typst code. The syntax is nice enough though that I can fully understand that writing something oneself is very simple once you understand the concepts (content as a type; `show:` vs `show [rule]:` vs `set`; control flows with `if`, `for`, `while`). And for any questions there is an active discord channel with helpful real people.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#349It's great to see Typst getting more visibility. We migrated a real-world workload to it a couple of years back: generating and e-mailing 1.5M+ PDFs daily at my org, Zerodha. Our previous pipeline was LaTeX-based (first pdflatex, then lualatex), but we were constantly fighting cryptic memory errors on large documents and huge Docker image sizes that slowed down boot times of our ephemeral workers. Switching to Typst…
I am using a LaTeX pipeline for creating text, invoices, forms, etc. from snippets stored in a database. It was quite complicated to set up, but the results are very satisfying. In principle, I would like an easier markup language, but am afraid to wast my time trying out something new, just to run into limitations after awhile. Here are my most important requirements: Multiple columns configurable for meaningful col…
I think so!
I've not tried a couple of things you mention (e.g. background images) but e.g. for dynamic placing there are libraries like https://typst.app/universe/package/meander
The core of Typst is a pretty featureful well-thought-out FP language. This makes expressing libraries for any piece of functionality very pleasant.
Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
#350Tex doesn’t attract software developers. The programming language has remained really old fashioned and clunky. The error system is particularly bad. I use it on a daily basis, and it doesn’t feel nice, far from the experience with Python or Rust. The output is superb though, which is why everyone in academia keep using it. It’s just the tooling that is poor. I think it needs to be modernized.
The modernized version is Typst though.. it's closing the gap to (La)TeX really fast