Live data from Hacker News

Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

mickael.canouil.fr

61–70 of 101 posts

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#61
post #38

Typst is the most important open source project of the last 5 years. I predict a future where markdown and latex are largely replaced by typst. And I couldn't be more excited. It is such a stepup from markdown and latex. Try it today if you are intrigued.

Not so sure. I work with a lot of people in academia who work with LaTeX. I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists. And the source material is usually just thrown in Word or LibreOffice. The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not? There's not much reason to. And you will hit the same brick walls doing so…

> I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists.

It was released in 2023 and became polished enough to use like last year. Yeah, adoption takes time but the technology is significantly better.

> The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not?

With latex you have to rely on third party. With typst you can write it yourself (or with an agent), like writing functions is not painful in typst.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect for consistency with ggplot - the same reason why ‘aes’ is shorthand and everyone forgets that it stands for “aesthetic”. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/labs.html

Thanks, that makes sense. I actually just parsed aes as related to encryption without even considering how weird that was given the contect.

I get it – in my (limited) opinion, there's a lot that's quirkily (but avoidably) named about ggplot and the surrounding R ecosystem in general.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#63
post #58

Is typst a good tool for something like a flyer (eg, printable respecting fold lines) or more generically one-page posters? I see PDF as a blessed output, but it seems mostly in context of longer form typesetting -heavy workflows (books, papers), rather than design -heavy.

Probably not. As you point out, it's a typesetting tool like LaTeX, not a page layout tool.

You could probably write a template that does the right thing, but that's true of LaTeX as well.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#64

Is ggplot2 considered to be a nice interface to plot things compared to say matplotlib in Python? I'm asking out of curiosity, I haven't touched R much

I find matplotlib to be clunky and verbose compared to ggplot. When using python, I will often use https://plotnine.org/ because it gives me a nice ggplot like API.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#65

Always pleased to see Typst mentioned. TeX made a lot of choices that made sense at the time, but TeX macros and C #defines especially when nested and/or not properly bracketed to allow nesting are a mess when things go wrong.

It is fun how in computer science terms, TeX and Typst are so incredibly far apart. TeX is a macro language that could be implemented in very little memory, while Typst literally memoizes every typst function's result; to the point where it will eat all available memory if the document and its editing increments needs it.

This reflects the time in which they were developed.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#67

Typst is the most important open source project of the last 5 years. I predict a future where markdown and latex are largely replaced by typst. And I couldn't be more excited. It is such a stepup from markdown and latex. Try it today if you are intrigued.

How is it an step-up from markdown? Markdown (w/o any embedded html) is a simple text formatting that lets you read it as a plain text file with some minor formatting when rendered. Typst source files are not human readable in the same way and would be terrible at it. Typst is great when you need typesetting, but if you just want plain text, readable files it isn't it. E.g. markdown for notes, typst for papers.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with markdown is that it's not extensible and that there is no spec. Essentially all READMEs would be better off using typst, they would make for better READMEs.

There have been theoretically precise published specs for serious markdowns for 15 years. The commonmark convention is a common specification for many including e.g the familiar simple github variant, which emphatically does have a completely perfect specification.

Commonmark isn't serious because it doesn't include several major quality of life improvements like [^1] for footnote/reference syntax. Pandoc should be the serious "common" markdown standard.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#69
post #58

Is typst a good tool for something like a flyer (eg, printable respecting fold lines) or more generically one-page posters? I see PDF as a blessed output, but it seems mostly in context of longer form typesetting -heavy workflows (books, papers), rather than design -heavy.

Depends on what the poster is. If it's still mostly text content, just arranged in a certain way, then by all means you can. For example:

https://typst.app/universe/package/poster-syndrome

And here's one for foldable cards:

https://typst.app/universe/package/keepsake

(Not endorsing those specific packages, they're just the first ones I managed to find)

For more free-form layouts, I just use Inkscape. It has built-in PDF export which works great. I assume other similar tools like Figma or Illustrator would also work well.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#70
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so sure. I work with a lot of people in academia who work with LaTeX. I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists. And the source material is usually just thrown in Word or LibreOffice. The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not? There's not much reason to. And you will hit the same brick walls doing so…

Academia is stuck in the past in a lot of ways.

Just use it and advertise it; they'll catch on eventually.
Post reply on HN