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Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#361

Post by Onawa »

didericis wrote: post #308
ossner wrote: post #176

The crucial component for the success of this, in my opinion, is the acceptance of Typst templates in scientific journals and conferences. The adoption of something like this in universities relies entirely on the adoption by these publishers. I see almost no support in the scientific community for Typst since everyone already has a LaTeX template for a thesis, paper, slides, etc. Researchers need to take the initiat…

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.…

That's exactly what Quarto is, and there are already a handful of good journal templates for Quarto to choose from.

https://quarto.org/docs/journals/

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#362

Post by jijijijij »

sevensor wrote: post #324
jijijijij wrote: post #157

Earlier 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…

I wrote my dissertation this way. As long as you’re already comfortable with latex, it’s amazing. Huge time saver not to have to write latex formatting when you don’t have to, but an equally huge time saver to be able to control formatting when you need it.

It's a bit of a weird thing, really. I think, I have not seen any comprehensive, basic tutorial on the matter. I presume a lot of people who've become victim of the LaTex bug, but dislike its overhead, independently found bliss in this pandoc compromise. It's definitely a bit of coping with LaTex Stockholm syndrome, you probably need a specific set of experiences, know some struggle to fully appreciate it.

If anyone here hasn't messed with it, but thinks "I wonder, if LaTex could ruin my life, too", I suggest to start learning pandoc first (it can do various markup conversions, it's useful by itself). Get familiar with pandoc metadata headers on a RTFM basis. A LaTex intro is all you need after that, if you are up for a bit of trial and error. Or learn LaTex first, but not both at the same time, as the layered processing involved is a bit confusing (e.g. pandoc showing pdflatex errors). In any case, I strongly advice to bite the bullet and install the full LaTex package of your distro (no idea about macOS, or windows), as fighting dependencies is suuuper annoying. However, the trade-off is it's truly a behemoth, consequently frequent upgrades for a lot of packages you don't ever use. (I configured dnf to download upgrades automatically, so I can do a quick `dnf upgrade --cacheonly` when opportune.)

Speaking of... I wish pandoc could do Tex package management and dependency resolution.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#363

Post by flokl »

fl0id wrote: post #340

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)

If the project owner has paid for pro, all collaborators can use the pro features in the project.

Zotero sync is just a .bib file that updates itself regularly, so if you don't want to pay, you have to upload the .bib file or past the new entries manually.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#364

Post by sevensor »

jijijijij wrote: post #362
sevensor wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote my dissertation this way. As long as you’re already comfortable with latex, it’s amazing. Huge time saver not to have to write latex formatting when you don’t have to, but an equally huge time saver to be able to control formatting when you need it.

It's a bit of a weird thing, really. I think, I have not seen any comprehensive, basic tutorial on the matter. I presume a lot of people who've become victim of the LaTex bug, but dislike its overhead, independently found bliss in this pandoc compromise. It's definitely a bit of coping with LaTex Stockholm syndrome, you probably need a specific set of experiences, know some struggle to fully appreciate it. If anyone…

I ended up just downloading the texlive image and letting it go slightly stale while I wrote. Latex plays poorly with OS package managers and I decided I preferred to be out of date.

I made each chapter a separate file and compiled each one to latex. I had a top level latex file that did an \include{} for each chapter, and a big old Makefile to tie everything together, including figure generation.

All this, and it was still easier than writing every latex command by hand.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#365

Post by pbronez »

vessenes wrote: post #122
Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #121

As 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…

Same boat here. It’s a very good layout language. And vastly superior production process. Will you find new edge cases? Yes. Is there a large user base covering all problems? No. You can add: “Does Claude Code understand it well enough?” No as of a year ago, last time I checked.

AI support is an interesting new facet of ecosystem quality. I wonder how much of this can be obviated with high quality tools. Coding agents can leverage language servers and documentation fairly well, but it’s not clear to me if that can fully compensate for weak language coverage in the training data.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#366

Post by tomjen3 »

thiagowfx wrote: post #344
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…

> 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?

(not op)

I have had no luck with LLMs writing typst code. Normally its a better code writer than me, but the LLM (gpt4-o maybe?) hallucinated most of the document.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#367

Post by sieve »

malshe wrote: post #302
sieve wrote: post #31

I have been planning to put out a quarterly Sanskrit newsletter for some time now, and was dreading having to deal with LaTeX. For basic stuff, LibreOffice PDF export works. But that is not a plain text workflow. I then discovered typst and it is a breath of fresh air. Unicode/Dēvanāgarī support out-of-the-box, no installing gigabytes of packages, near-instant compilation. My complements to those who got this done.

Where can we sign up for the newsletter?

I will post it on our website as well as reddit when it is ready. I am taking my time to ensure that it does not become a one-off thing and can continue for many quarters.

- https://www.adhyeta.org.in/

- https://old.reddit.com/r/adhyeta/

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#368

Post by Myrmornis »

tedzards509 wrote: post #348
thiagowfx wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 us…

Presumably it works fairly well if you include a syntax cheatsheet and some example typst markup in the context you send to the LLM?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#369

Post by GavinMcG »

shakna wrote: post #357
GavinMcG wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Things from the design world, like Acceptance Criteria would happily require it.

Is a lightweight easy-to-read plain text markup language the right tool for that job?

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#370

Post by shakna »

GavinMcG wrote: post #369
shakna wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things from the design world, like Acceptance Criteria would happily require it.

Is a lightweight easy-to-read plain text markup language the right tool for that job?

Absolutely! The writers are generally not highly technically experienced, but have to produce highly technical documents that need to be regularly reviewed and changed for years at a time.
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