Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX • Hacker News Board

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#241

Post by gxonatano » Wed, Oct 16, 2024, 11:07 PM UTC

Typst is a huge improvement over LaTeX, but makes the rather anachronistic decision to target paper-based media instead of screens. Unless you're planning to print out all your papers onto physical paper, and you have stacks of different sized paper lying around (A4, US Letter, US Legal, etc.), PDFs are kind of old-fashioned. Why constrain your document's width to eight and half twelfths of the length of some medieval king's foot, when we have cutting-edge 1980s technology like HTML which can adapt to your screen width?

Incidentally, there's an open issue with Typst for making HTML output, but I don't understand why that wasn't the project's first priority. Even if scientific journals require PDF uploads, you can still get those from printing HTML. The opposite isn't true at all.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#242

Post by wint3rmute » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 10:39 AM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #186

wint3rmute wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope, didnt event knew such a thing existed :)

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#243

Post by vslavkin » Tue, Oct 22, 2024, 11:02 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #203

vslavkin wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems good, and there's an emacs version, altough simpler than auctex. Not having the preview in the code buffer, isn't a dealbreaker, especially when typst is so fast, but it's still a useful feature. The part of the packages I wasn't talking about a tex feature but an emacs one. When you import a package, it'll usually add environments or macros (in typst i believe they are called commands). Emacs would recogniz…

With typst you can get autocomplete for symbols imported from packages or defined locally. And your bibliography can use the same .bib files as latex if you want to. I’m pretty sure the typst editor plugins also know which mode you’re in and give you different autocomplete suggestions depending on the mode. But yeah, it’s probably still not quite as mature. But it is, in my opinion, much better designed. What feature…

I've been using it a bit and it works very well, altough it's hard to get used to its way to define ”environments”. About cetz, I miss mainly circuits. There's a plugin, but's years behind circuitikz or its alternatives. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't tell if the support for mindmaps, trees, etc. is as good.