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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

fransskarman.com

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Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#171

Post by diffeomorphism »

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.

This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint, note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc..

Obvious reasons:

- Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you want it to look good.

- You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine.

- Spending time on tooling feels productive even if it is not past a certain point.

- People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend time on it.

That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different journal templates, so the less custom code the better.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#172

Post by whatever1 »

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 give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors.

But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#173

Post by franga2000 »

justinnk wrote: post #111
dleslie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a deep incentive to drive users to subscribe, and that's directly at odds with keeping all of the document rendering open source. It makes a lot of sense for them to provide document features that are only available to subscribers.

What you suggest seems plausible, but there is a very good counter example. Overleaf is also managing well by relying on the open-source LaTEX. What drives people to subscribe is not the typesetting itself, but the ecosystem around it (collaborative editing, version management, easy sharing, etc.). You can make money with those and still have the rendering free/open-source. I believe a similar thing is/will be true f…

It helps that the LaTeX ecosystem is such a flaming dumpster fire that you all but need a tool like OverLeaf to use it effectively.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#174

Post by thezoq2 »

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.

That is a real concern, but I wouldn't say there are any critical features in the closed source portion. I wrote the whole thesis locally with only open source tools. One of the included papers was written in the cloud platform for collaboration.

It is a concern that there is a single company doing most of the development, but there is quite a bit of community involvement so I don't think it is an immediate concern

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#175

Post by thezoq2 »

gumbojuice wrote: post #88

I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?

That is for sure my biggest concern with typst. I wrote a tool that can convert from typst to latex for final submissions, but it is a bit sketchy and at the moment won't handle math very well. https://gitlab.com/theZoq2/ttt

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#176

Post by yusina »

cycomanic wrote: post #94
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.

From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily. Sure, theoretically you can…

> Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks,

I theory, yes. And that's also what I'm usually trying to do.

What I have observed though with Latex folks is that they type 3 words and then look at the preview or re-compile to see if it looks good.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#177

Post by mr_mitm »

jeffparsons wrote: post #10
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

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…

I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago: if [ -z "$(find . -name "*.bib" -print0)" ]; then # Just two runs, to cover TOC building, etc. pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \ pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" else pdflatex…

There can still be cases where a fourth run is necessary, theoretically a fifth run. There are even cases where you get into an infinite loop, for example if you use the vref package. It will "cleverly" replace references to things like "figure 3 on the next page" or "figure 3 on page 8". When the reference is expanded, it might cause the figure to move to the following page, which means the reference is then contracted to "on page 8", which means the figure moves back to the original place again, in which case the reference must be updated, and so on ...

LaTeX will usually tell you by including a warning in the output ("LaTeX Warning: Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to get cross-references right."), which no one reads, because it is so verbose. Not having that warning is not a guarantee that it's now stable either, so our Makefile actually compares the PDF files minus variable bytes like timestamps to know whether the build converged.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#178

Post by thezoq2 »

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #140

Is Typst’s typesetting quality on par with « bare » LaTeX ? with LaTeX + microtype ? It may be stupid and vain but for me if it doesn’t at least match the former it’s a no-go

Until 0.13 it wasn't quite as good as latex in my experience, it mainly inserted more hyphens than LaTeX.

As of this version, it would be very hard to tell a difference in my experience

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#179

Post by Paapaa »

gumbojuice wrote: post #88

I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?

There are already at least two publishers which accept Typst. So that "ever" part is already covered. But most still don't accept Typst and LaTeX is usually mandatory if the sources are required.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#180

Post by thezoq2 »

shrinks99 wrote: post #40

Very cool! I ran into the multiple bibliography issue when attempting to typeset my grandmother's PHD thesis which I was able to rescue from the 5.25" floppies it was originally stored on. I was planning on waiting until they solved this officially to resume that side project, but might give Alexandria a shot!

That sounds like a fun project! Alexandria is the way to go for now but hopefully they will get proper support for it sooner rather than later.
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