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Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
151–160 of 192 posts
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#152This looks really great and I'll give it a try. I keep thinking, however: My guessed probability that LaTex is free and maintained in 15 years: 99.9999% My guessed probability that $OTHER_NEW_TOOL is free and maintained in 15 years: 5%
The curse of early-and-good-enough systems. It's the same for bash and a few other things. Not enough pain points to replace them even though there's lots of better alternatives.
The curse of support.
If you need something that will be supported for the next 20/30/50/100 years, you pick an already established product that is widely used and does not depend on any single organization. You can't rely on volunteer projects, as volunteers have no duty to maintain and support the product. And you can't rely on anything made by a single company, as companies lose interest and die all the time.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#153Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like. In com…
Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that, journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges to LaTeX/Word would fall in place. For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source). Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs…
Typst is missing vital features to produce professional looking documents. Latex and Adobe InDesign use paragraph based algorithms for line breaks and hyphenation (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380111102 for Latex). That is the main reason why papers written in Word look so amateurish. Proper support for footnotes seems to be also lacking in Typst.
Footnotes might be handled properly in a future version of Typst. Regarding paragraph formatting I'm not so optimistic. I've read the thesis and papers by one of the Typst authors. They either don't seem to be aware of better approaches or they simply don't care about aesthetics.
Edit: Another thing that irks me about Typst is that it does not seem to be a purely not-for-profit project. It is tightly entangled with their commercial offering, whatever that might mean for the future of the "free" version.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#154I'm surprised to see that HTML output is currently in progress, and was not a core feature from the start. [0] LaTeX's awkward relationship with the web seems like something a competing greenfield project would try to nail right out of the gate (to mix metaphors painfully). [0] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
Typst wants to compete with LaTeX. They both face the same problem, namely that the web and paper work completely differently and there are untranslatable concepts. So you have to define some way in which your typesetting gracefully settles into a different environment. If typst had targeted html immediately it certainly would have made their life a lot easier, but it would have been nothing more than an overly compl…
I would prefer some tool that generates better e-books, like an improved ePub format with better equations and tables.
This division between web and PDF is meaningless to me. The ePub format is a book format based on Web technologies.
A better book format is to the benefit of everyone. To believe HTML can only make websites is counterproductive here.
I make PFDs in LaTeX because I am asked to use it, not because I believe it is a good format.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we don't reach that much quantity, but we do a hefty number. What for? Invoices! We're having problems because until now PDFs are being generated by the ERP system, and it can't keep pace. I know there's a Dev team working on a microservice for PDF generation, but never thinked about doing it with Typst. I think I'm going to send them @mr-karan link.
pdf/ps can easily be created in a way that data for text and qr code fields are easily in plain text. seems like yall focusing too much on the higher level tools instead of what's right in front of you.
Company branding is an important aspect of PDF creation that many tools struggle to handle correctly. PDF documents often need to include logos, company colors, fonts, and other branding elements. Puppeteer is popular because you can control these aspects through CSS. However, Puppeteer can be challenging to work with for larger documents, as each change requires programming effort or when your software needs to needs to serve multiple clients each with different requirements.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst wants to compete with LaTeX. They both face the same problem, namely that the web and paper work completely differently and there are untranslatable concepts. So you have to define some way in which your typesetting gracefully settles into a different environment. If typst had targeted html immediately it certainly would have made their life a lot easier, but it would have been nothing more than an overly compl…
I would prefer some tool that generates better e-books, like an improved ePub format with better equations and tables. This division between web and PDF is meaningless to me. The ePub format is a book format based on Web technologies. A better book format is to the benefit of everyone. To believe HTML can only make websites is counterproductive here. I make PFDs in LaTeX because I am asked to use it, not because I be…
PDFs are a digital recreation of paper documents, with all the drawbacks of that.
Targeting ePub is essentially the same as targeting the web, the distinction between having the file locally or retrieving it from a server seems entirely meaningless in this context.
>not because I believe it is a good format.
It is a pretty much perfect format within the constraints.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#157I love Typst for text and equations, but I find that it is taking me time to adapt to their table syntax and be able to make tables similar to booktabs. I'm hoping that Estout or Modelsummary will be able to write Typst tables with complex formatting soon.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the feature I'm talking about comes out of the box. One just writes \documentclass[twoside]{article} \pagestyle{headings} in LaTeX. And this also does the right thing on special pages like table of content, appendix, bibliography etc. Implementing all that in Typst is quite a hassle.
The 'La' in 'LaTeX' stands for 'Lamport'. Leslie Lamport set up additional macros atop the base TeX language to make life easier. To this day LaTeX code can still be compiled with `pdftex` (note, no 'la' there). The `article` document class is actually some `article.cls` file that resides somewhere in your TeX install root, is loaded, and implements macros such as `/title`, `/section`, `subsection`, and so on. All La…
So I think Typst should come with a few default templates like Latex to make writing easier for beginners.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#159This looks really great and I'll give it a try. I keep thinking, however: My guessed probability that LaTex is free and maintained in 15 years: 99.9999% My guessed probability that $OTHER_NEW_TOOL is free and maintained in 15 years: 5%
The curse of early-and-good-enough systems. It's the same for bash and a few other things. Not enough pain points to replace them even though there's lots of better alternatives.
Also the curse of paradigm.
Making tools libre as a matter of course and mailing people checks for bug finds just rings different than today's dominant paradigm of landing pages, conversion rates, social media tie-ins and for-profit non-profits...
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#160Can I use this to generate PDF invoices from PHP? I've been searching for a good solution for the past 15 years. Never been happy with the solutions, and my PDFs are always very ugly.
Used it in a recent PHP project, only real caveat/issue I ran into is you can't pipe out to STDOUT on windows:
Wrapper class I wrote to handle it: https://gist.github.com/tehbeard/a54a2c77b4b8bf1af26920ce7a7...>