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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

#251

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#252

Post by jonathanstrange »

I've never had a big complaint about LaTeX, it's easy to get into and the results are stunning if you use it minimally and with care. They only thing I've always been missing was a way to make it easier to have perfect register-true typesetting for books. This has to do with LaTeX's paragraph flow algorithm and lack of global optimization, or so I've been told.

Can Typst provide better register-true layout? That would be interesting to me.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#253

Post by rcpt »

It's been a decade since I wrote anything in LaTeX and I echo all it's pain points.

But it seems like LaTeX is the kind of thing that LLMs would nail perfectly. I feel like using it today wouldn't be very bad.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#254

Post by gsinclair »

PatronBernard wrote: post #231
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.

I hate a lot of things about LaTeX (also wrote several theses in it, as well as research articles), but the math syntax definitely wasn't one of them. Why on earth would they change it?

I think anything that is chock full of backslashes and braces can surely be improved upon.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#255

Post by thoroughburro »

retorquere wrote: post #209

> 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 Engl…

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

Nope: not possible to automatically determine which capitalised nouns are proper (and thus remain capitalised in sentence case) and which are common (and thus become uncapitalised).

This is in fact why it is better to store sentence case: it can be unambiguously converted to title case while the reverse is ambiguous. It’s not mere preference.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#256

Post by rcpt »

noelwelsh wrote: post #141
TimorousBestie wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package development time. Now they also have to compete with the millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.

I've done some simple Typst programming via Claude, and it worked fine. I expected it to be ignorant of Typst but that was not the case. One of the best things about Typst is that most tasks are very simple. Compared to the reams of Latex BS I was replacing, building my book with Typst is momumentally simpler.

Sure but if the LLMs are making LaTeX easy to work with then why bother trying migrate everyone to a new language?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#257

Post by dimatura »

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?

Yeah, that was my first thought. And it's not just about them accepting typst, but also whether they would provide a template using typst, like they currently do for latex. Using the conference/journal template to write the article saves a lot of time for both submitters and editors (who have to deal with hundreds, if not thousands of submissions).

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#258

Post by CodesInChaos »

Generally Typst looks like a significant improvment over LaTeX to me. The language is cleaner and easier to understand, and the first class scripting support is appealing. Its embeddability and templating features make it an interesting option for automated PDF generation (e.g. invoices) as well.

However its handling of introspection and convergence gives me a bad feeling.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#259

Post by [deleted] »

mr_mitm wrote: post #147
diffeomorphism wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, obviously. Do you delete all source code once you compiled a binary? Any future corrections, additions or other modifications are made to the source, not the generated old pdf.

LaTeX is not as stable as people make it out to be. I don't know how many packages there are for working with tables, but 20 years ago, `tabu` was the most recommended package, until the maintainer stopped responding. Now the package is incompatible with almost everything else, leading to headaches when trying to compile old documents: https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu https://tex.stackexchang…

[deleted]

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#260

Post by da_chicken »

Aurornis wrote: post #112
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…

> 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 always feel like I’m doing something wrong when I have to deal with LaTeX and lose hours to fighting with the tooling. Even with a clean install on a new mac…

I still dislike the idea that my document formatting and layout system really needs a build environment. Because let's be real, almost nobody actually needs it for genuine typesetting. I think the problem with LaTeX is that it's too flexible.

It reminds me a little bit of the problem of Linux distributions. Linux is supposed to be a system with the bazaar model instead of the cathedral model. Except what you actually end up with is that each distribution becomes it's own cathedral, because building a whole system now requires major decisions to be made. LaTeX class files feel like the same thing.

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