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Typst 0.15.0

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Re: Typst 0.15.0

#22
post #20

I'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with. I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mo…

"LLMs struggle with Typst a bit"

My experience is the opposite. Especially when instructing the LLM to do very fine grained and detailed adjustments. Works like a charm.

Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.

Re: Typst 0.15.0

#23
post #9

As a non-developer who really only uses computers to write and produce documents, why would I use typst over org-mode or $your_fave_markdown + pandoc?

Markdown is for "I want to type semantic content and get a vaguely reasonable result". Typst is for typesetting documents where you care what the output looks like, and where you want a print-quality PDF (or, in the future, also HTML; currently still WIP).

Re: Typst 0.15.0

#26
post #20

I'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with. I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mo…

"LLMs struggle with Typst a bit" My experience is the opposite. Especially when instructing the LLM to do very fine grained and detailed adjustments. Works like a charm. Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.

I had the same experience as the root commenter. Sometimes ChatGPT seems to generate invalid typst code that doesn’t even compile. Maybe the syntax changed and it did work at some point but some stuff looked so wrong that I would guess it just doesn’t have enough training data for proper typst generation without feeding examples into the context first.

Re: Typst 0.15.0

#27
post #11
post #9

As a non-developer who really only uses computers to write and produce documents, why would I use typst over org-mode or $your_fave_markdown + pandoc?

I'm sure everyone has their own use case but I use typst for resumes or other documents that I want to keep in git but I need to share with others using PDF. I use typst in visual studio code using tiny mist extension. I can generate PDF without installing any new software other than vscode which I already have and the tiny mist extension. The live preview is also nice. The one thing that bothers me is the dollar sig…

Markdown has the same class of issue and resolves it the same way you would with Typst: The escape character \. You instead write saved \$50 million using C\#.

Re: Typst 0.15.0

#28
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pass a JSON structure to a Typst document and render it however you like. No need for a templating engine or anything like that. Pandoc probably uses latex under the hood, and Typst is order of magnitudes faster. Also, much better error messages. Typst is vastly superior for usage in automation or when developing document classes. If that's not your use case, don't bother.

To produce a pdf, pandoc uses typst, pdfroff, lualatex, whatever you please. There is no particular connection to latex. The idea exhibits complete ignorance.

There was probably a nicer way of expressing this, but yes, ideally I will continue to use Org mode for my documents and substitute typst for LaTex when exporting to pdf.

Re: Typst 0.15.0

#29
I've been using LaTeX for math for over a decade now. I'm pretty happy with it frankly, but there are major pain points in the compilation time and whenever it's time to interface with the language programmatically. Typst is, frankly, awesome in that regard.

However, I really dislike the 'magic' in the math mode syntax, and I think dropping backslashes (more generally, a delineator) for commands was a mistake. Those aren't blockers though, and I think the org is largely making good decisions. I'm really looking forward to the day I can write research in it!

I think all that's remaining is time in the community and stability. Once journals begin accepting it, I know I'll definitely try to submit in it.

Re: Typst 0.15.0

#30
Almost exactly a year ago, I made the switch from generating LaTeX from markdown using pandoc to typst. Best decision I have ever made. I can actually write my own macros (both LaTeX and pandoc were a pain in the ass).

The ecosystem is not quite a mature as latex, however I can implement the things I need myself.

If you are on the fence, do yourself a favor and try it. There is a VS Code extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=myriad-d....

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