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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

#211

Post by ykonstant »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #38
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…

Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.

For the record, at UIUC we had a bunch of seminar classes (and I think a regular class?) on LaTeX and technical document creation, ran by A.J. Hildebrand; it was a fantastic course and I learned a lot of folklore "secrets" that the manuals will not tell you, as well as technical writing tips that were far from obvious.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#212

Post by rrgok »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #64
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 do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX. Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful. Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.

It seems the grammar of the language was an after thought... It amazes me that he spent so much time perfecting the laying out algorithms that he could not come up with a sane language.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#215

Post by mr_mitm »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #130
commandersaki wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX: 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling. 2. Compiling is instant. 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style). 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vi…

> 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}. > 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks. TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic lin…

I think what the GP means is that whitespace is often not ignored by LaTeX, so line breaks can cause extra wide spaces between words. It's common to comment out the line break in LaTeX for this reason. This is much less of an issue in Typst (if at all) due to the separation of code and content.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use...

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#216

Post by ykonstant »

wenc wrote: post #30
TimorousBestie wrote: post #6

I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly. Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.

Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code. I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff. Cla…

I don't know about Claude, but when it comes to LaTeX IDE, I will always recommend TeXStudio over everything else. It handles all the annoying problems of LaTeX setup and compilation, and it provides a discoverable interface with classic-style menus (words, it has words instead of inexplicable little icons!) for various common tasks.

I say that as someone who uses a tricked-out Vim for my own LaTeX workflow, and VS Code for several programming languages.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#217

Post by vessenes »

dkga wrote: post #41
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…

Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?

An llm friendly language spec would help, I’d guess. FWIW it’s a common long tail language issue — everybody’s realll good at python and typescript, things fall off from there

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#218

Post by ykonstant »

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?

I sincerely doubt they will: most journals in pure math still do not accept LuaTeX; just think about that.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#219

Post by dwayne_dibley »

Syzygies wrote: post #96

AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are far more concise than LaTeX source. I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the right touch for working with AI on topological research and code. It…

- AI is the primary audience for our writing

I've been wondering about this a lot lately, specifically if there's a way to optimise my writing for AI to return specific elements when it's scraped/summarised (or whatever).

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