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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

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Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#101

Post by nxpnsv »

Syzygies wrote: post #96

AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are far more concise than LaTeX source. I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the right touch for working with AI on topological research and code. It…

Printing is still not uncommon in professional scientific environments. When you actually have to read a paper, it turns out that actual paper is quite convenient.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#102

Post by cAtte_ »

dleslie wrote: post #75

In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part and implementing critical features in the closed source portion. Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.

you are wrong. typst's lead dev has stated that an important goal is to have the CLI (which is open source) and web app behave identically, even refusing to implement such a basic feature as PDF embedding because, due to technical reasons, it is currently incompatible with this goal. [1]

typst, the project, is not by any means a "mix" of open and closed, even if typst, the company, is. indeed, the most thorough LSP implementation available (tinymist) is not only open source but a community project. for another funny example see typstify, a paid typst editor not affiliated with the company. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145#issuecomment-17531...

[2]: https://typstify.com/purchase/

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#103

Post by duped »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #49
shermantanktop wrote: post #16

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.) And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1…

On a total tangent, I found out that my grandfather's university digitized their entire library a few years ago including his masters' thesis from 1948. Back then it was written with a typewriter and by hand for everything else.

I bet he could have done something more advanced if he had modern computers, but looking at it 75 years later and seeing his handwriting on the page was moving more than the content itself.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#104

Post by emmelaich »

Jap2-0 wrote: post #60
pdpi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, b…

Yet Word is leagues ahead of Google docs... ( shudders )

There are add-ons for Gdocs. This is apparently pretty good. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autolatex_equat...

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#105

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

moelf wrote: post #87
dleslie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For now, that's the entire collaboration component. It would make sense to build a portion of document rendering in that context which won't be found in the open source portions. A value-add to convince users to subscribe.

>For now, that's the entire collaboration component. And LaTeX has this for free? It's separated concerns, I think the analogy is Overleaf and LaTeX but just happened to be made by the same group of folks, it doesn't have to go down the monetization-at-the-cost-of-your-user route.

> And LaTeX has this for free?

Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host, but it's missing quite a few features from the paid version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted version for collaboration.

[0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans

[1] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf/

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#106

Post by bee_rider »

generationP wrote: post #51
porcoda wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros. I’ve found in the decades since then that my most prod…

Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed theorems or fancy headings.

Tikz is sometimes useful, but it can also be a massive time sucking pain in the butt.

I mean it is one of the few packages that can actually manage to annoy LaTeX fans, which is really saying something.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#107

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

__float wrote: post #48
nextos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff. Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.

It depends what you're typesetting—if you're using letter/A4 paper with 1" margins, then you're unlikely to notice any difference; but if you're using narrow columns, then it will vastly reduce the number of paragraphs with ugly huge spaces between words. Margin kerning is the other big feature, but you probably won't notice that unless you're fairly picky.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#108

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

shermantanktop wrote: post #55
wyager wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste. Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not ju…

I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. Probably. It’s the sort of ritual humiliation that academia specializes in.

> I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was.

At least 1 [0], but that's obviously a rather special case.

[0] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#109

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

nextos wrote: post #32
pcfwik wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy…

LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints. Latexmk is one way to address this problem. A good IDE like AUCTeX can also figure out how many times the compiler should be invoked. Good IDEs will also provide other invaluable assistance, like SyncTeX (jumping from source to exact point at PDF, and back).

> LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints.

That's certainly part of it, but any typesetting program will need multiple passes to properly handle tables of contents—you can't know a section's page number until you've compiled everything before that section (including the table of contents), but adding a new section to the contents could push everything ahead by another page. The only unique thing about LaTeX here is that it directly exposes these multiple passes to the user.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#110

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

vessenes wrote: post #34

I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine has some additional vertical control for long documents that latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Ma…

> and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst

I'm surprised to hear that—I've been using GitHub Copilot with ConTeXt [0] since 2021, and it mostly works fairly well. And ConTeXt is much more obscure than Typst (but also much older, so maybe that gives it an advantage?).

[0] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Introduction/Quick_Start

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