I personally like using code blocks with math as the language Gives you a nice, block level element, and it's easy to reason about
I don’t really like that either since code blocks are supposed to be verbatim, and the language is only supposed to be a hint for syntax highlighting. Additionally you also occupy the first tag which may be an issue when e.g. writing a preample for a latex renderer (or if you want to pick a different renderer).
True
Djot solves this with tagged literals, but no one seems to want to use djot
Typst has probably saved us thousands of dollars generating PDF documents programmatically.
Is this because it has replaced paid SaaS for you?
Yes. Although many document generation SaaS platforms are not transparent about their pricing, they often charge a few cents per document. This is somewhat unacceptable given that the marginal cost is almost zero.
Typst is great. I think they'll catch up to LuaTeX in terms of typographic quality in near future. But Typst is for typesetting; it's essentially a programming language for layout. If you compare it to e.g. Asciidoc, the latter is for content and semantics. We need both. But Asciidoc has unneccessary complexity and ambiguity, and the results are often surprising. So I made an unambiguous, deterministic subset of Asci…
Typst is great. I think they'll catch up to LuaTeX in terms of typographic quality in near future. But Typst is for typesetting; it's essentially a programming language for layout. If you compare it to e.g. Asciidoc, the latter is for content and semantics. We need both. But Asciidoc has unneccessary complexity and ambiguity, and the results are often surprising. So I made an unambiguous, deterministic subset of Asci…
Situation: There are 15 competing standards.
Which ones do you mean? I'm only aware of the "official" specification attempt of Asciidoc; mine is a (much leaner) alternative to that. If you mean the different markdown dialects or e.g. Rst, they play in a different league. DocBook was the de facto standard for serious technical documentation for well over a decade. AsciiDoc was created as a plain-text, human-readable alternative to DocBook; it has taken on DocBook's former role as the go-to system for serious technical book publishing, used by O'Reilly, Red Hat, and many open source projects.
Typest is amazing, Claude Code + Opus 4.8 knows how to use it, but I found that Claude by default is crap at designing even a reasonably formatted PDF. E.g. Claude sets the line height to be so small, all the lines are squished together, and a 1-pager PDF is half blank. I see many folks saying you're producing beautiful PDFs. How are you dealing with design?
Have you tried showing Claude your output, or simply telling it to look at the PNG output? Together with some design or frontend skill you should get reasonable results.
Thanks, good idea to give it the feedback loop, will try