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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've recently made a dozen vastly different projects with Typst, ALL of which would have created dependency hell, syntax noise, and hours of extra pointless work in Latex. It's such a clear win at this point it's embarrassing.
reminds me of when LyX became trendy with a small group of optimists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst lacks PGF/TikZ alternative.
https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz
Cool. I've moved on to typst and hope to never touch latex again in my lifetime...
But in the end, it worked surprisingly well. Mind you, I didn't have anything too fancy in the paper (no figures, minipages, tikz, etc...), so that made the task very easy. But it was a good workflow:
- Write org-mode text in left buffer.
- Have Emacs issue a .tex export on save.
- Have the document automatically compile when .tex files are newer than the .pdf file
- Have the right buffer show and automatically reload the pdf file.
The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, followed by an era of resting on one's laurels while creating very little, mostly just stuff built on top of existing systems in an attempt to simplify things, which only resulted in making them more complex and fragile, with zero innovation.
Today, we have generations of developers who simply don't know classic FLOSS tools beyond the surface level and lack the technical background to create new ones that aren't dependent on the tech giants. This is because obsolete universities have de facto trained legions of big tech labourers rather than autonomous technicians capable of standing on their own two feet.
The issue is that there was never a real desire to give "the power of computing" to end users. Consequently, at the first opportunity, the desktop was undermined and rejected to keep everyone dependent on someone else's services. Now, young developers don't know how to evolve back towards the desktop, even though they sense, without fully understanding, that this is the right way forward.
We are losing decades of potential evolution with repercussions for centuries to come, just to feed a handful of people who profit from others' ignorance.
So, while it's true that on one hand we have excellent tools that are obsolete, clunky, and difficult to integrate today, it's also true that on the other hand we have a void. This is because the foundations of modern software are flawed and unsustainable, created solely for the interests of Big Tech. Either we move past this or we head for ruin, as has been happening for some time now; eventually, it will be impossible to carry on and we'll have to start again from scratch, with enormous costs, delays, and damage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've recently made a dozen vastly different projects with Typst, ALL of which would have created dependency hell, syntax noise, and hours of extra pointless work in Latex. It's such a clear win at this point it's embarrassing.
reminds me of when LyX became trendy with a small group of optimists.
If I had to use LaTeX, I'd definitely do it via LyX.
Cool. I've moved on to typst and hope to never touch latex again in my lifetime...
ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads. https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do. If you're curious about how to build TeX from scratch, have a look at my TeX.SE answer: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/576314/2148 I'd imagine making a FOSS port in Rust that has non-c…
> It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
I don't know what constitutes "sane", but I literally just downloaded and installed it right now because you mentioned it, and it choked on a trivial hello world:
$ mtxrunjit --script context doc.tex
...
> tex error on line 1 in file doc.tex: ! Undefined control sequence
...
1 >> \documentclass{article}
2 \begin{document}Hello, world\end{document}
I feel like this is gonna be a tougher sell than you expect. How the heck is a user expected to switch to ConTeXt?
The system is flexible and simple.
Used TeX for the same and had to lose sanity for it to even work semi well.
ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads. https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do. If you're curious about how to build TeX from scratch, have a look at my TeX.SE answer: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/576314/2148 I'd imagine making a FOSS port in Rust that has non-c…
The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.
BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.