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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

#271

Post by lizimo »

We [1] have been using Typst to generate PDF documents in production for a few months, such as invoices and labels. It's generating thousands of documents daily, and I'm glad that some of them are printed and used by people in the warehouse who are doing real work.

I really like the simple syntax that Typst provides. It would be much harder for the PMs to edit the templates if we went with other solutions, such as wkhtmltopdf.

We also looked into other document generation services that provide a WYSIWYG interface, and they are all quite expensive and often lack advanced scripting capabilities.

[1] https://garnercorp.com/

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#272

Post by jll29 »

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…

Many people use LaTeX via Overleaf (a Website, cf. https://overleaf.com ) rather than installing it locally.

That also solves the problem of having to install locally vairous extension packages or fonts - all is already there, and after writing a paper you may submit it directly to some conferences or journals from that Web GUI instead of having to email it or upload to a third site.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#273

Post by colejohnson66 »

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…

> Journals justify their fees by claiming its for typesetting [..]

Because they used to actually be doing that. Historically, science journals were pay-to-play because the journal had to typeset your document and print it. But with the advent of computers, they had to pivot while still retaining their revenue streams.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#274

Post by someuser2345 »

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.

That's not the definition of insanity, that's the definition of practicing.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#277

Post by lol768 »

lizimo wrote: post #271

We [1] have been using Typst to generate PDF documents in production for a few months, such as invoices and labels. It's generating thousands of documents daily, and I'm glad that some of them are printed and used by people in the warehouse who are doing real work. I really like the simple syntax that Typst provides. It would be much harder for the PMs to edit the templates if we went with other solutions, such as wk…

How have you found the generation performance? It seems like this should really be a perfect fit for this sort of use-case, and I'd hope the memory footprint and speed are all much more competitive than HTML-based approaches.

The team I'm currently working with are using Gotenberg for things which we can afford to take a little while, and C#/Skia for things which need to be reasonably quick.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#278

Post by mixmastamyk »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #109
nextos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints. Latexmk is one way to address this problem. A good IDE like AUCTeX can also figure out how many times the compiler should be invoked. Good IDEs will also provide other invaluable assistance, like SyncTeX (jumping from source to exact point at PDF, and back).

> LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints. That's certainly part of it, but any typesetting program will need multiple passes to properly handle tables of contents—you can't know a section's page number until you've compiled everything before that section (including the table of contents), but adding a new section to the content…

As long as it’s deterministic it should be fine. Run the commands in a makefile. Doesn’t sound like the case.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#279

Post by xhkkffbf »

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…

A few parts are dramatically slower. Images for me, for instance, really slow down the compilation, especially if latex needs to read a high definition image into memory. Raw text like that from a novel is very fast.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#280

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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…

The major selling point to me, is that I can write the content I want, in a rather straightforward manner, and then just apply whatever formatting is necessary. It makes a lot of sense in the context of, say, university, where you're taking multiple classes, which each use different formatting guidelines, but those formatting guidelines stay the same for the duration of the course. I could just figure out (either using existing formats, or by hand-rolling my own) a document type for each class, and then never think about formatting again, whereas with a word processor, you've got to keep in mind the arcane series of steps necessary format your document in whatever style you require, and then pray that any modifications you make don't break the formatting.

The other place it's useful is heavily typeset documents, especially those subject to somewhat frequent modification, like a resume.

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