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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

#261

Post by noelwelsh »

rcpt wrote: post #256
noelwelsh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think there are a bunch of assumptions behind your statement that I believe are not true:

1. Latex is sufficient for all document publishing needs. E.g. converting Latex to HTML is bad to non-existent, while Typst has HTML export.

2. LLMs are sufficient for solving all problems one can encounter.

3. Things that are easier for humans are not also easier for LLMs.

4. New releases of LLMs will not learn more about Typst

At the end of the day I'm not trying to migrate anyone. Use whatever you feel is best. For my use cases I'm convinced Typst is a better option than Latex.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#262

Post by afdbcreid »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #157
lblume wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A slight bias in favor of the status quo might be acceptable or even desired. However current LLMs strongly favor traditional languages and are unable to comprehend even modern language features not part of their base training set. Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could…

> Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently. I'm not actually sure that would be a bad thing? All the reasons that immediately come to mind to move away from C have to do with ergonomics and safety, the latter largely being a product of the former IMO. If an LLM can ingest my entire codebase and do 90% of the work to get me to th…

If we get a completely autonomous AI it probably won't program in C (or any other human-understandable language).

If it still programs in a human readable language, that means people need to review the code, at least from times to times. And it's much easier to review modern languages than C.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#263

Post by JohnKemeny »

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…

> 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 [...]

I hope you are aware that literally all research in mathematics and computer science is typed up and published in LaTeX?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#265

Post by cbondurant »

The initial motivation of LaTeX compile times being slow is very interesting to me.

I use LaTeX as a tool for layout of books to print for hobby bookbinding and my current project - a 3 megabyte, 500k word beast of a novel - only takes around 10 seconds to compile.

I cant imagine what the friend of the author here had going on in his paper such that his compile times took such a hit. Required use of specific LaTeX libraries dictated by the journals he was submitting to that were written inefficiently? specific LaTeX features or packages that end up hitting significantly slower codepaths?

Makes me wonder if its not LaTeX itself that is the speed issue but instead the very maturity of the ecosystem that it has as advantage over Typst. It could entirely be possible that once Typst has the wide berth of features and functionality available through its ecosystem, that it would become just as easy to fall into compile time tarpits.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#266

Post by TimorousBestie »

rcpt wrote: post #256
noelwelsh wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> why bother trying to migrate everyone to a new language?

.. because a new language might be better?

But moving forward it’ll be harder to tell if any given new language is better than existing alternatives. LLMs burden their users with an almost insurmountable status quo bias.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#267

Post by davemp »

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, \\ \…

Agreed. I’ve done a far bit of math in both and typst’s choices are way more memorable and ergonomic.

It’s not like keeping the syntax would really gain typst anything besides folks not having learn new things.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#268

Post by noelwelsh »

cbondurant wrote: post #265

The initial motivation of LaTeX compile times being slow is very interesting to me. I use LaTeX as a tool for layout of books to print for hobby bookbinding and my current project - a 3 megabyte, 500k word beast of a novel - only takes around 10 seconds to compile. I cant imagine what the friend of the author here had going on in his paper such that his compile times took such a hit. Required use of specific LaTeX li…

My experience is the same as OP: Typst is significantly faster than Latex. My book has all of table of contents, parts and chapters, figures, code samples, tables, images, and bibliography. These are all going to require multiple passes to layout. E.g. you cannot insert page numbers until you have laid out the table of contents, as it comes before other content. However you cannot construct the table of contents before you have processed the rest of the document. A typical novel won't have most of these, and so I think it will be substantially easier to layout.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#269

Post by octernion »

brtv wrote: post #206
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?

well it was a mix of word and markdown files being converted before; converting the word files was somewhat annoying but iirc i exported them and converted those. i wrote all the custom styling we used; pretty straightforward

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#270

Post by almostgotcaught »

shusaku wrote: post #5
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…

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

Almost every compiler is a multipass compiler.
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