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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

#191

Post by vessenes »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #110
vessenes wrote: post #34

I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine has some additional vertical control for long documents that latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Ma…

> and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst I'm surprised to hear that—I've been using GitHub Copilot with ConTeXt [0] since 2021, and it mostly works fairly well. And ConTeXt is much more obscure than Typst (but also much older, so maybe that gives it an advantage?). [0] https://wiki.contextgarden…

I’ll tell you my failing prompt - hopefully you can help! I haven’t tried since 4.0 / o3 / 2.5 pro came out.

I want a flowed book layout (so we have a facing page with inner and outer margins.)

I am rendering chats in the main part of the page. Chats alternate left and right alignment so it looks a bit like a text conversation. For each chat I want to put metadata (reactions, sender, time) on the margin it is aligned to.

So For a left chat, on a left page, I want to use the left (outside) margin. A left chat right hand page the inside margin.

Two things I could not get sorted: first, perfect vertical alignment between the chat and metadata, ( I think this is possible but difficult) and a persnickety bug where the first chat on each page chooses the last page’s proper margin side.

Happy to pay for an answer - I did try to hire a typesetter for this as well.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#192

Post by _Algernon_ »

a5c11 wrote: post #165
shusaku wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

Last time I checked, flipping a coin twice gave different results.

Did you flip the coin in the exact same way? Probably not.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#193

Post by xigoi »

api wrote: post #44
wenc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Given that LLMs can or soon will be able to turn markdown or word into LaTeX this filter won’t last long. It’s a dumb filter anyway.

Markdown and Word don’t have the tools to express what LaTeX can. Not even your deity of choice will ever be able to turn the former into the latter, let alone an LLM.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#194

Post by xigoi »

blitzar wrote: post #142
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.

Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.

> Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting?

Because its target userbase is people who don’t give a single shit about typography.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#195

Post by xigoi »

shermantanktop wrote: post #55
wyager wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste. Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not ju…

I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. Probably. It’s the sort of ritual humiliation that academia specializes in.

Poor typesetting is like going to an interview in your underwear. While it may not directly reflect your skill, it says a lot about how much effort you like to put into things.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#196

Post by Paapaa »

mollerhoj wrote: post #189
Paapaa wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That" in my sentence meant that Typst web app is closed source.

But that doesn’t make much sense - by your account Latex would also be a mix of closed and open source, since closed source web apps exists for writing Latex.

What does not make sense? Did you mean to answer to someone else? I only stated that Typst (the typesetting engine) is free to use and modify, and only the web app is closed source. Typst can be used without touching any web apps. I use Typst locally.

I made no claims about any mixes or claims about LaTeX.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#197

Post by gf000 »

dleslie wrote: post #86
the-wumpus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source. Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally. I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0…

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.

There is quite a clear distinction/border between an Input-Output rendering kind of program sitting beneath everything, and a web service providing stuff like collaborative editing, free hosting etc on top.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#198

Post by iNic »

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.

People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#199

Post by gf000 »

ummonk wrote: post #98
the-wumpus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have some incentive to drive users to subscribe, but they have other forms of income, and I think if they ever implemented even a single feature of actual rendering that was closed source their community would riot and we'd get a community managed fork (probably by the guy who does the language server...). The only way they can continue to gain traction is if they never ever in any way lock people to the web app…

Is there really a community of volunteer contributors that could fork it if that happened? Typically with a corporate-backed project like this, the corporate development tends to crowd out the formation of a volunteer community of contributors that would be able to take over development.

All the typesetting extensions and such are a community effort. There are so many specific use cases that can only be/will be done by very specialized academics that a non-networked product would die on the vine.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#200

Post by jeffparsons »

berti wrote: post #183
jeffparsons wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g.…

I’ve run into this exact issue several times with group projects at university in the 2010s, and each time recovery was copying chunks of plain text from backup copies into new documents as you say. Luckily by the time we got to the final year capstone project the whole group was happy to go with LaTeX. Not sure if these Word issues have even been fixed since.

I don't have a source for this, so take it with a huge grain of salt... but for some reason I have a memory of someone telling me that the older versions of Word saved and loaded documents by writing the bytes of in-memory data structures directly to files on disk, with not much in the way of marshalling or validation in the middle. Because it was fast, or something. You can imagine the kind of edge cases and oopsies that might result.

The new versions at least serialise to some kind of monstrous XML representation of Word's internal state, so while it's not going to win any awards for world's most elegant document format, it should be slightly harder to corrupt in subtle ways.

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