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Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

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Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#171

Post by laurmaedje »

anserin wrote: post #164
xkevio wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misunderstanding what exactly you are looking for? You can change the spacing in math mode of symbols/operators with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/class/ and delimiter size with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/lr#functions-lr (or automatically).

I didn't know about math classes, thank you for the reference The issue I have with delimiters is that there is no option for "big", but only for "140%" or whatever, making it harder to be consistent Someone created an issue on this on GitHub if I remember correctly And automatically chosen sizes are often too large

Good point! lr should support lengths in addition to ratios. Should be easy to add.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#172

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

laurmaedje wrote: post #169
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure what you're referring to because when justification is enabled Typst uses almost the same line breaking algorithm as TeX. [1] One problem we had was over-eager hyphenation. We've addressed that recently. [2] [1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/9b001e21121ab7b5645aa36f... [2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4584

That is great news! It wasn't there the last time I checked. Maybe I missed it. Thanks for clarifying!

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#174

Post by Shorel »

enriquto wrote: post #165
Shorel wrote: post #150

Two things interest me from this project: More templates than LaTeX. I have made PDF presentations in LaTeX, which look good, but they all look the same. Some variety is good. Unicode chars support. I prefer to type α instead of \alpha. That's it, both things together will make a LaTeX killer for me.

> Unicode chars support. I prefer to type α instead of \alpha. This is not done by default by LaTeX, but if you can bear to \usepackage{unicode-math} then it's readily available. A life changer! Regarding presentations, what do you mean exactly? There are a lot of weirdly different beamer themes. You can even put a single verbatim block inside each slide and you'll just have a "text mode" presentation, if that is you…

Thank you about the unicode-math package. I will surely use it.

About the presentations: All beamer themes look similar to me.

Open PowerPoint template gallery to see how different the designs can really be!

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#175

Post by ttul »

Working as an intern in 1999, I was tasked with writing a standards document for VoIP telephones for the TIA working group working on this space. The standards organization had a Word template that everyone used, but as an engineering student, I had been working with and loving LaTex for some time and so naturally I thought… “why not just use LaTex? The final output will be in PDF anyway and the formatting will be better.”

The LaTex output was indeed better. My boss loved my work and had no idea that I wasn’t using Word. Feedback from the working group members was also positive. Wow, this kid has real talent! As a startup, making a positive impression on the giant companies represented in the working group was extremely important for the future of the company, if not its survival.

Unfortunately for me, one day my boss said, “could you send that Word doc over to big-whig so-and-so at massive-company-we-might-be-acquired-by? They want to use it as a template for a new document they’re writing.”

I got that sinking feeling similar to when my mom found out my friend and I had peed in my closet as an experiment at age four.

I then hired a friend to work all weekend painstakingly rewriting it in Word. Boss man got the document. Company was acquired for $100M 18 months later.

Either way, LaTex still looks 1,000x better than Word.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#176

Post by xkevio »

anserin wrote: post #164
xkevio wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misunderstanding what exactly you are looking for? You can change the spacing in math mode of symbols/operators with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/class/ and delimiter size with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/lr#functions-lr (or automatically).

I didn't know about math classes, thank you for the reference The issue I have with delimiters is that there is no option for "big", but only for "140%" or whatever, making it harder to be consistent Someone created an issue on this on GitHub if I remember correctly And automatically chosen sizes are often too large

Ah, yeah fair enough! I was confused thinking that you were unaware of the existence of the functionality as a whole. Well, as laurmaedje (one of the main devs) said below, it should be easy to add, though it seems difficult to find which size values `big`, `bigg` and so on exactly represent.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#177

Post by mr_mitm »

jltsiren wrote: post #152
viraptor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LaTeX's support is already problematic. Most people just don't use it in sufficient intensity to notice. We produce thousands of (mostly) custom written technical reports a year using LaTeX and there are all sorts of subtle issues cropping up. It's a distribution (edit: or at least texlive is) of many, many packages from many developers, and maintenance can be spotty and vary. Unlike some people would like to believe, stuff breaks all the time.

Check this out for example: https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu

This used to be the most recommended package for tables.

This bug is still not fixed after at least 9 years AFAIK: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203629/longtable-and...

It affects us regularly.

I'm not even going to comment on the fact that all of the following packages provide some sort of tabular feature: array, table, tabu, tabular, tabularx, longtable, supertabular, longtabu, xltabular, lxtable, booktabs, tabularray, ctable. Good luck figuring out which one does what you need and has the least side effects with everything else.

Also, while I'm not familiar with the internals of the LaTeX project, I keep reading the same names, most of which appear to be getting closer and closer to retirement. I wonder if suitable successors will pick up the task of maintaining LaTeX in the future.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#178

Post by owenpalmer »

This is a Typst + Neovim live preview project: https://github.com/chomosuke/typst-preview.nvim

It looks similar to Gilles Castel's famous note-taking setup:

https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

I would love to see someone combine this with Anki for quick math flashcard creation

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#179

Post by tecleandor »

1oooqooq wrote: post #170
mstijak wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 need…

how having the value and name in an invoice as plain text affect branding? or do you mean there client branding is added to the invoice?? the end result when you open the file is still a regular pdf. it's just encoded with some areas unpacked

It's not about the plaintext, but about the layout, design and logos. At least in our case.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#180

Post by 1oooqooq »

tecleandor wrote: post #179
1oooqooq wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how having the value and name in an invoice as plain text affect branding? or do you mean there client branding is added to the invoice?? the end result when you open the file is still a regular pdf. it's just encoded with some areas unpacked

It's not about the plaintext, but about the layout, design and logos. At least in our case.

so why you bring that up on a thread that had nothing to with layout? I'm honestly confused
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