Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

fransskarman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 338 posts

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#201

Post by gf000 »

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.

Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no chance of noticing unless a full review.

And publishing is the primary way academics communicate en large - it's kinda important to be able write your specific notation without resorting to drawing on paper.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#203

Post by RobertBobert »

Paapaa wrote: post #196
mollerhoj wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#204

Post by gf000 »

yusina wrote: post #176
cycomanic wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, as with code, the actual typing is not really the bottleneck.

I also basically read the right pane rendered output, but mostly as a "reading out what I've written and evaluating whether it sounds good" most of the time, not really messing with layouting (especially that LaTeX and Typst does that very well, I can be reasonably sure that my paragraphs will have decent hypens and such).

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#205

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

kzrdude wrote: post #162
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And LaTeX has this for free? Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host, but it's missing quite a few features from the paid version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted version for collaboration. [0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans [1] https://github.com/overleaf/ove…

The free plan on overleaf only allows collaboration between 2 people. If you have 3 students in your report assignment then you can't use overleaf for free. That sounds like a sign that overleaf is struggling, that they had to make that change. And Typst is more generous there, you can collaborate 3 people with no problem.

> The free plan on overleaf only allows collaboration between 2 people. If you have 3 students in your report assignment then you can't use overleaf for free.

Yup. You used to be able to share projects with unlimited people via link sharing, but they annoyingly got rid of that last year [0]. And Overleaf's cheapest plan is still more expensive than a basic VPS, so it's actually cheaper to self-host (which is what I'm doing [1]).

> That sounds like a sign that overleaf is struggling, that they had to make that change.

Either struggling or realized that they have a captive audience—if your professor requires assignments to be typeset with LaTeX and assigns group projects, there aren't really any other options.

[0] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/changes-to-project-sharing

[1] https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/overleaf

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#206

Post by brtv »

octernion wrote: post #12

i switched all of our pdf generation to typst - fantastic software. love how efficient it is; it makes previewing trivial and iteration very fast.

Interesting! Did you use a tool to do the conversion automatically? How did it pick up on custom packages and styling?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#207

Post by kjoona »

meehai wrote: post #158
Paapaa wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf hm ?

Overleaf isn't fully open source either, since they have a paid tier with features which are not present in this repo. Inline commenting for example, is a Server Pro -only feature.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#208

Post by jeltz »

meehai wrote: post #158
Paapaa wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf hm ?

Read your own link before posting. While the parent was wrong about it being fully closed source the Overleaf editor isn't fully open source either, it is open core under AGPL.

> If you want help installing and maintaining Overleaf in your lab or workplace, we offer an officially supported version called Overleaf Server Pro. It also includes more features for security (SSO with LDAP or SAML), administration and collaboration (e.g. tracked changes). Find out more!

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#209

Post by retorquere »

> But in the Bibtex file it is very common for the titles to appear in their original title case form

That is common because they are following the rules about how to steer capitalisation when using bib(la)tex:

- If the entry is in English, and the style demands title case, output as is

- If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence case, convert to sentence-case and output

- If the entry is not in English, output as is

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#210

Post by patall »

aitchnyu wrote: post #115

Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.

Maybe if it's completely distinct. Else definitely no, unless, maybe, if the model is fine-tuned. Had a discussion about it with my dad whos work is developing in a non-mainstream SmallTalk dialect where it doesn't work at all.
Post reply on HN