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Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

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Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#381

Post by northlondoner »

constantcrying wrote: post #105
northlondoner wrote: post #40

Typst is a markdown plug-in. It is a productivity tool. It lacks the standalone nature of LaTeX as a language and proper extensibility.

How does a project with a built in package manger and a wide variety of packages lack "proper" extensibility?

Smaller community compared to LaTeX may lead to perceptions of lacking "proper" extensibility. For users needing niche or low-level typesetting capabilities, LaTeX’s mature and highly flexible system may still feel superior. Build-in package manager does not necessarily 100% guarantee full extensibility as in crazy Latex macros ;-) As I said, it is a young project and young company, it will grow in time.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#382

Post by coliveira »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #343
coliveira wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Millions of people love to use LaTeX and use it daily. Your experience is just a personal opinion.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#383

Post by tcfhgj »

coliveira wrote: post #382
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Millions of people love to use LaTeX and use it daily. Your experience is just a personal opinion.

Your claim is just a claim.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#384

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

coliveira wrote: post #382
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Millions of people love to use LaTeX and use it daily. Your experience is just a personal opinion.

Millions of people love traffic jams which is why they're happy they can have them twice a day.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#385

Post by mcny »

ithkuil wrote: post #32
mcny wrote: post #17

Since there are typist folks here, how do you work with hash and dollar signs? If I want to write C# on my resume, I do C`#` but there has to be a better way?

I'm not a typst user but from a quick look at the language you should be able to type C\# You can also write a macro #let csharp = [C\#] And then use it as #csharp

Thank you! I don't know how or why this works but on my computer, turns out I can skip the square brackets which I tried out after seeing your answer.

    #let csharp = "C#"
for some reason this works and does not throw an error. so now I can use it like

    == Technical Skills
    - *Languages:* #csharp, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, SQL, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, Rust, Go, PHP

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#386

Post by bogeholm »

fn-mote wrote: post #292
bogeholm wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

> The amount of \makeatother, and what does that even mean?? I’m not a TeX lover, but this part is just a snipe. I’m guessing you know and this was a joke. Apologies that it annoyed me enough to write this comment. If you care enough to read this, you could learn the purpose of \makeatother [1]. It’s not tricky. [1]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8351/what-do-makeatl...

Apologies, my comment was poorly written.

I meant “\makeatother, and a lot of other things whose meaning is not clear”

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#387

Post by Ericson2314 »

zzless wrote: post #354
Ericson2314 wrote: post #312

LaTeX is a horrible system, that has some fans who are basically cultists. I suppose people like it cause Knuth, but remember Knuth just made Tex. Imagine if C++ had stayed a hodge podge of extra tools compiling to C and C macros? That's LaTeX relative to TeX. Typst should win and destroy all this stuff. If was in control of government science funding, I would just make all the journals accept it immediately, just li…

This is a fine opinion, here is another one. Calling everyone who uses LaTeX cultists is a bit insulting. I do not particularly like LaTeX and use it only when a journal requires it in which case it is pretty much painless as I simply follow the provided template. TeX, on the other hand pretty much satisfies all my typesetting needs and I use it daily. I wish everyone would use TeX or LaTeX but I would not force it o…

I did not call everyone that uses LaTeX a cultist, I called everyone that is a fan of it a cultist.

> because it solves a problem that does not exist

No, the problems with LaTeX are real, objective, and undeniable.

> I am also weary of any piece of software that is controlled by a private entity, no matter how good the initial intentions are. Being open source is not really a guarantee of anything.

That is valid, but it does not excuse the accumulation of bad technical quality in LaTeX. Living in the stone age is not an efficacious solution to the problem of Typst's governance.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#388

Post by eigencoder »

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…

I know I'm late to this, but there is a minimal distribution of LaTeX that I used for e.g. writing my master's thesis. It's called TinyTeX.

https://yihui.org/tinytex/

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#389

Post by earthnail »

I just wrote up the solution for a combinatorics problem in Typst. It was my first time using it. Wow, it is so smooth, it's unbelievable. After this little exercise I'm 100% sold.

For homework-like tasks, Typst is so much easier to use than Latex. I can accept that Latex is still required for journals, but as more and more in academia will use Typst for their smaller day to day jobs, I'm hopeful that one day it will be accepted with journals as well.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#390

Post by fdekerm »

fdekerm wrote: post #374
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 wrote my PhD thesis in Typst last year. I also had to clone my university’s template (available here https://github.com/fdekerme/PhD_template_UPSalcay ), but the process was fairly straightforward. I’d say 99% of the experience was super smooth. It was a great decision, though risky as you mentioned—I started with Typst 0.11 and finished with 0.12. The only painful part (that last 1%) happened at the very end when…

just for the correctness, Typst 0.14 now supports all PDF/A standards: https://staging.typst.app/docs/reference/pdf/#pdf-a
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