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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

#241

Post by codeape »

From https://www.latex-project.org/about/:

"LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content."

IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use an outdated piece of typesetting software that is a) hard to configure, b) hard to use and c) produces output for the least useful reading platform available (paged pdfs).

And the pronounciation is stupid.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#242

Post by aragilar »

cbolton wrote: post #230
msravi wrote: post #144

I have only two peeves with typst. 1. They should have carried forward the latex standard as-is for math, instead of getting rid of the backslash escape sequence, etc. 2. There is no way to share a variable across a file's scope - so can't have a setting that is shared across files - not even with state variables. Other than this, typst is solid, and with the neovim editor and tinymist lsp, is great to write with.

Regarding point 1: I'm so glad they didn't keep the math syntax, there's finally progress in math text input! E.g. we can now write $ ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1, ... } \ QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ } $ $ a = cases( 0 & quad x 0 ) $ instead of \begin{align*} \mathbb{Z} &= \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\ \mathbb{Q} &= \left\{ \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\} \end{align*} \[ a = \begin{cases} 0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\ \…

You could use unicode-maths?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#243

Post by xkevio »

tcfhgj wrote: post #233
Paapaa wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already at least two publishers which accept Typst. So that "ever" part is already covered. But most still don't accept Typst and LaTeX is usually mandatory if the sources are required.

which ones?

IJIMAI (https://typst.app/blog/2025/typst-at-ijimai) and JUTI (https://forum.typst.app/t/juti-call-for-papers-best-paper-aw...).

Admittedly, not the most renowned or most known journals but you have to start somewhere.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#244

Post by aragilar »

IshKebab wrote: post #237
jltsiren wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You normally submit a LaTeX or Word document, and the publisher does the final typesetting. Even in computer science, where people often spend a lot of time tweaking the typesetting, the pdf generated by the authors is essentially a preview. There are often visible differences between it and the publisher's version.

Yeah this is one of the craziest things about the scientific publishing industry. Journals justify their fees by claiming its for typesetting, but all they are really doing is adding extra work to nit pick bibliography formats and so on (see the comments in this article about sentence case). Nobody cares about that. I don't think anyone even reads "journals" any more (except maybe Nature/Science etc.). They mostly ju…

I would note arXiv requires the source as well, and having the source is what is enabling the HTML experiments they're doing.

On consistency, what the journals provide is some level of QA (how much is a function of field and journal, rather than the what is charges), and the template is the journal's brand, so both the authors and journals benefit from the style (I can tell the difference between the different (all similar quality) journals in my field at a glance by the style).

It's also worth noting that there's a whole much of metadata that needs to be collected (whether you agree with it or not, funders require it), so a PDF isn't going to cut it here either.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#245

Post by jonathanstrange »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…

What do you mean by tooling? I've used LaTeX for decades to write books and papers and the combination with Emacs was flawless. The only major change for me was the transition from Bibtex to Biblatex.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#246

Post by tiffanyh »

codeape wrote: post #241

From https://www.latex-project.org/about/ : "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content." IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use…

Do you feel the same about Markdown?

Just curious.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#247

Post by BiteCode_dev »

RestartKernel wrote: post #13
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #11

Pro tips: type long content unformatted, or barely formatted, then ask an LLM to format it using your markup of choice, then clean up the thing it got wrong. They are very decent at inferring the context of stuff and will mark code, maths, titles so on farely decently. This lets you focus on the work of making it looks nice.

I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.

The LLM are already good enough to not do that anymore. Worst case scenario, you get wrong formatting, but not wrong content.

Markdown + pandoc is not the same: you need already basic formatting. You have to think about the formatting. For example, math formulas and code are gnarly to type, so I have snippets for them to avoid getting out of the flow.

But LLM don't need that, you can just dump your thoughts, and they format it.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#248

Post by lolinder »

codeape wrote: post #241

From https://www.latex-project.org/about/ : "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content." IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use…

Alternatively, they're people who write documents in a field where LaTeX is the standard, they're not computer savvy enough to try to even look for something new that might be acceptable or might compile to LaTeX, and at any rate they want to focus more on their research than they do on changing the typesetting norms in their field.

(No shade on people who do decide to use alternatives, and Typst is great!)

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#249

Post by jonathanstrange »

IshKebab wrote: post #237
jltsiren wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You normally submit a LaTeX or Word document, and the publisher does the final typesetting. Even in computer science, where people often spend a lot of time tweaking the typesetting, the pdf generated by the authors is essentially a preview. There are often visible differences between it and the publisher's version.

Yeah this is one of the craziest things about the scientific publishing industry. Journals justify their fees by claiming its for typesetting, but all they are really doing is adding extra work to nit pick bibliography formats and so on (see the comments in this article about sentence case). Nobody cares about that. I don't think anyone even reads "journals" any more (except maybe Nature/Science etc.). They mostly ju…

Citation and bibliography guidelines are by far the things that authors neglect the most, and they are absolutely essential to ensure quality.

Using PDF as an input format would make editing and typesetting practically impossible. Not that I haven't seen volumes where publishers did that but the results are abysmal and in my experience that only occurred with local "grey literature" like really crappy conference proceedings edited in an institute.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#250

Post by Tmpod »

Evidlo wrote: post #92
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…

Just use Tectonic nowadays for compiling LaTeX source. It automatically handles these cases of compiling multiple times.

+1 for tectonic, it's miles better than the alternatives for every single case, in my experience. Development seems to have slowed down lately, which is a shame.
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