121–130 of 338 posts
Sure, but in order to iterate you won’t have to compile the whole document but can just keep the chapter you are working on by structuring it with \includes
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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.
My makefiles ran it 4 times, i think. I still preferred it to Word.
Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.
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Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package development time. Now they also have to compete with the millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.
Which is good, because we don't want to deal with inferior solutions to typesetting that pop up every few years.
Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently. It's not just about Typst or typesetting specifically but programming language design in general and that improvements are becoming much harder to push through.
Typist will probably be dead or acquihired in a few years. Latex will be around for decades.
I've used Typst to generate reports in multiple languages and it works pretty well for this! I just pass typst JSON with the report data and use it from there.
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A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git. Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/p…
> The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document. I'm still sour about the 3 days it took me to have something usable for my thesis, and I was starting from an existing template. And it's still not exactly how I want it to be; I gave up on addressing a bug in the reference list.
Meanwhile, when I had a decent setup I could move a whole section from the intro to the results and the overall layout didn't suffer (floating tables, figures and code still in place, references still pointing where they should). I had code snippets with colour highlights imported from the actual source code (good luck trying that in Word). I could insert the companion papers with a single line of code per document, and they looked great. I even had a compilation flag to output the ereader version.
My take was that Word enabled my team mate to kick a lot of cans down the road (but the cans eventually came back), while for me the reverse was true: build a decent foundation, and after that it was all pure write-cite-compile.
It can be hard to write macros with state in typst.
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It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate). It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter desig…
> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor The experience is also awful. It's much better to write \in or \frac{}{} rather than to go to a dropdown menu and figure out which button to click.
I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo. Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.
These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX: 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling. 2. Compiling is instant. 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style). 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vi…
You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}.
> 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.
TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic line breaks and version control should work equally well with both LaTeX and Typst.
(I agree with all your other points though)