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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
181–190 of 243 posts
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#182C-f r u s t RET But of course. I'd rather see effort go into improving LaTeX performance instead of creating some new incompatible thing in a trendy language. One could also imagine an Elixer-style "resyntaxing" of LaTeX that would preserve compatibility with decades of packages. I don't think a long-developed ecosystem should be given up lightly.
TeX has three actively-maintained engines, and there are a lot of folk putting work into improving LaTeX and its ecosystem. So effort is going into LaTeX, including performance, right now. Probably someone committed a perf improvement today, or in the last week.
There are problems with TeX which can't be fixed, problems which Typst is directly addressing. I wish them all success. I will never understand the attitude which holds that because some established system exists, nothing in the same category of program should ever be written. Let people cook.
I do understand Rust fatigue but the swipe here is uncalled for. This isn't a "rewrite it in Rust", it's a new language which happens to be implemented in Rust, and y'know what? Good choice frankly. There are tasks where "fast enough" isn't a meaningful concept, and compiling raw documents into a finished form is one of those tasks.
TeX and LaTeX aren't going anywhere, and Typst has years of work ahead of it to ever offer a comparable richness of capability. If it incrementally replaces the use of LaTeX over time, that will be because it earned it.
Have you used troff lately? Probably not. Things change. And yet man pages are written in nroff to this day. Dr. Knuth wrote TeX because what existed at the time wasn't working for him. Typst likewise.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#183The central issue for new typesetting methods, unlike most software projects, is that to represent a solution, not a new problem, they must seamlessly communicate with other similar environments. So I have to ask:
* Can Typist seamlessly export Latex?
* Can Typist seamlessly import Latex?
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right that it's been on the roadmap for a while, however, it's definitely very high on their priority list. The recent update (v0.12) contained a lot of necessary internal refactorings of the layout engine, and they've mentioned on the Discord that after v0.12, they will start work on HTML output.
I really hope so, and I will start recommending typst when there is good accessible output. However, it’s also been a “top priority” since basically the first release.
The issue is a bit more than a year old.
Feel free to step up and close it. Complaining about it isn't going to add velocity to a new project.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#185the current show-stopper issue is that Typst can't insert PDF as figure[1], this makes a lot of scientific publication workflow impossible. [1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145
It's a somewhat difficult issue and I understand being hesitant because of this. Converting to SVG is one possible path around it which isn't too bad but having it natively is of course even better.
The thing is, inserting PDF for just the PDF export would be quite easy. The issue is the other export targets Typst supports (SVG and PNG) as that would require some form of rasterization / a full blown PDF engine written in Rust without C-bindings because of the web app and that simply does not exist yet.
And the developers are hesitant to just add features for one specific export target which I get.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#186In the near future, I'll have to program the document generation part of an invoicing system. In the past, I've done generated PDF documents through latex, and didn't really like the process (for one, escaping is just so weird in latex, \ to \textbackslash for example). I've thought about generating HTML and using a headless browser that can produce PDFs for me, but I don't know how well you can e.g. control page bre…
I'm doing PDF document generation in typst, the format I'm generating is similar to invoices (specific to how the law in my country is, but that's a longer story). Typst code generation was easy to automate with trivial python templates (jinja2). The core part of my document are multi-page tables, and typst splits them nicely. I had to google around a bit, as there are multiple settings on how large tables are handle…
Thanks! Are you using the json loading feature in typst at all?
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#187In the very limited time I used typst it has been pretty amazing, but imho there is one missing feature that a LaTeX successor, but even more so, templating engine should have. Come up or adapt a format, that can defer certain styling decisions to the consumer of the document. Stuff like, font, font size, line spacing, citation style, double or single column, numeration style, etc. On a different note, we got to find…
> Come up or adapt a format, that can defer certain styling decisions to the consumer of the document. Stuff like, font, font size, line spacing, citation style, double or single column, numeration style, etc.
We have that, it's called HTML. The use case is quite different from PDF though.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#188I've been looking into it. It's `blazingly fast` (aside from the rust joke, it really is way faster than latex), the syntax is more "modern", consistent, etc. The main problem is the popularity. It just does not have enough packages, at least for my use case. I mainly do a lot of equations (simple math), and a loooot of tikz (forest, circuitikz, pgfplots, etc.) [ https://gitlab.com/vslavkin/escuela/-/tree/main/5to?re…
Judging from the releases page on Github, Typst has been in the public since May 2023. You can hardly expect it to catch up with decades of LaTeX packages in that time.
Typist is a bit older than that, it was born in 2018. Regardless, I don't expect it to have feature parity with latex, but it still lacks several important and simple packages.
Besides, I was just making a point on why people in a similar situation to mine should/shouldn't use it for big documents; what I found good and bad; and what would maintainers need to develop for more people to switch
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#189In the very limited time I used typst it has been pretty amazing, but imho there is one missing feature that a LaTeX successor, but even more so, templating engine should have. Come up or adapt a format, that can defer certain styling decisions to the consumer of the document. Stuff like, font, font size, line spacing, citation style, double or single column, numeration style, etc. On a different note, we got to find…
There is no universally correct layouting. I for one absolutely detest epub versions of scientific books. Even if they are the official variant and not a generated one from some other format that understandably sucks, diagrams will be all around and I have to go back and forth and lose context. PDFs for all their shortcomings are a godsend and they do their single job perfectly. I much rather zoom in on my phone to a paragraph than look at a badly placed diagram taking up half a page in an unrelated context.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#190I've been using Typst for a while. It's a joy to write in but currently has very limited scope. There's a good summary of its current limitations here https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1ej07al/why_i_use_la... .
For me, it's basically a non-starter for academic work because it doesn't support PDF and EPS images (there are currently issues with SVG too). They also have no plans to support PDF graphics (https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145).