Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

Post by sega_sai » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

Post by Animats » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 9:41 PM UTC

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…

    #figure(
      image("image.jpg", width: 70%),
      caption: [
        Observe the image in the picture
      ],
    ) 

Post by airstrike » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 9:45 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #14

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…

> The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. The problem is that extending Markdown syntax gets messy. #figure( image("image.jpg", width: 70%), caption: [ Observe the image in the picture ], ) This is kind of a strange blend of Markdown, CSS, JSON, and HTML. TeX at least has a consistent syntax.

    #let img(filepath, inset: 0.5em, caption: none) = {
      figure(
        box(inset: inset, stroke: 0.5pt + gray, image(filepath)),
        caption: caption
      );
    }

    #img("images/excel-5.0.png", caption: "Microsoft Excel 5.0 was released in 1993.")

Post by smartmic » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #14

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…

> The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. The problem is that extending Markdown syntax gets messy. #figure( image("image.jpg", width: 70%), caption: [ Observe the image in the picture ], ) This is kind of a strange blend of Markdown, CSS, JSON, and HTML. TeX at least has a consistent syntax.

Post by raphman » Sat, Oct 12, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

huijzer wrote: post #4

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.