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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

blog.jreyesr.com

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Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#2

Post by alphazard »

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this.

The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often.

Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more similar to Markdown, and yet it exists at some strange middle point in the language design space, arbitrarily far from Markdown.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#3

Post by prettymuchnoone »

alphazard wrote: post #2

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this. The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often. Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more simi…

Could you give an example of how it could be more similar to Markdown? I recently used Typst for my bachelor's project and never really thought that it needed to be simpler

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#4

Post by huijzer »

alphazard wrote: post #2

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this. The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often. Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more simi…

Well maybe it’s good to make it clear that it isn’t markdown to avoid confusion? Also Typst has less syntactic sugar which also has benefits.

More generally, I am really impressed by Typst’s abstractions. I have typset my whole PhD thesis in it without needing any external packages. It was so easy to use the basic building blocks and write a few extra functions for the rest.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#5

Post by vivekd »

I've tried typsit and Ive really been enjoying it. It's very easy to learn and easy to use. It's a new project so it can't as of yet replace the functionality of LaTeX's many packages. However it is good for quick and easy texts, it's replaced markdown and office for me for writing simple documents on a computer.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#7

Post by llm_trw »

alphazard wrote: post #2

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this. The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often. Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more simi…

Markdown is a very poor language to try and use for anything other than single column typewriter like text.

As evidenced by the fact that every project which uses it for more than that adds arbitrary extensions.

The minimum viable language for non-mathematical technical documentation is reStructuredText.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#8

Post by mbivert »

alphazard wrote: post #2

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this. The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often. Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more simi…

I'm not sure the selling point is similarity with markdown, but rather, to improve, or modernize LaTeX/TeX-the-language/s: TeX is really archaic: if you're curious, there's a series of articles by overleaf[0] detailing some of TeX's inner-working, quite insightful.

I remember reading — but can't find a source at the moment — that TeX originally didn't had counters; people came to rely on Church numerals[1] instead, before Knuth finally implemented them.

EDIT: found out where I've read about it: [2]

[0]: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/A_six-part_series%3A_Ho...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29713270

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#9

Post by bitexploder »

Built my resume with typst and know of several other folks using it for serious document typesetting. It is a very nice and modern typesetting system and language that just feels easy to make it do what I want.

It incorporates elements like templates and it is very easy to create reusable content “functions”. It is everything I want out of LaTeX while being super fast and easy to use.

Edit: pandoc can generate typst output if you want to explore :)

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