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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

#301

Post by ykonstant »

shakna wrote: post #236
ykonstant wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No. Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on handsomely. Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down the line it is possible that maintained forks will be controlled by big publishers pa…

TeX Live started in 1996, current update release is March, and has active conferences next year. They're an open source group, that has so far survived the test of time, and I'd suggest motivations are there to keep that into the distant future. Unless academia collapses.

I hope you are correct!

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#302

Post by cbolton »

msravi wrote: post #294
cbolton wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just have a master settings.typ that you import in top1.typ, top2.typ and top3.typ? Alternatively, you can pass global settings at build time with `typst c --input name=value` Maybe I misunderstood though, if you can link to an actual example (gist or something) I'd be happy to try and give a concrete solution.

> Just have a master settings.typ that you import in top1.typ, top2.typ and top3.typ? Yes, but each included file (like education.typ, publications.typ, etc) should also get these settings propagated from top - which typst doesn't allow - the appropriate settings need to be included in each of these files. > you can pass global settings at build time with `typst c --input name=value` This is something I did not know…

You can import settings.typ in top.typ, and then import top.typ in education.typ. This way the variable/function definitions will propagate.

Or you can import settings.typ in all files that need it (education.typ, etc.).

What doesn't work is to have a file like top.typ contain

  import "settings.typ": *
  import "education.typ": *
and hope that this will make settings available in education.typ. Because each .typ file is "pure" in the sense that it only knows the variables/functions that are defined in the file, or imported. This way you don't have a file magically affecting the bindings available in another file, which is nice.

It's true there are cases where you'd like something like the above. Currently you can do something like that using states and context (basically putting the "settings" into the document and retrieving that) but it's not so nice. In the future the plan is to make this nicer by allowing custom type definitions (and having show rules and set rules work with them as they work with built-in types).

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#303

Post by Jap2-0 »

Skeime wrote: post #139
pdpi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, b…

Last time I checked, Word was also basically untenable for math-heavy writing because there was too much procedure involved in setting a formula. This is fine if you need one here and there, but if you have lots of formulas (including many tiny ones, like just using the name of a variable), switching to a dedicated formula mode in the interface is just not pleasant. In LaTeX (or Typst), I just type $, and off I go.

Alt + = will put you in the equation editor fairly easily, and from there you can pretty much use LaTeX notation.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#304

Post by Rendello »

ykonstant wrote: post #218
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?

I sincerely doubt they will: most journals in pure math still do not accept LuaTeX ; just think about that.

It makes sense. LaTeX fetishists tend to be sadomasochists.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#305

Post by BrandoElFollito »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #289
Diti wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t getting different results the norm in programming anyway? Developers usually don’t make the effort to include idempotency and make builds reproducible.

Normally, if you compile the same code twice on the same machine, you'll get the same result, even if it's not truly reproducible across machines or large gaps in time. And differences between machines or across time are usually small enough that they don't impact the observed behavior of the code, especially if you pin your dependencies. However, with LaTeX, the output of the first run is often an input to the secon…

I wrote my PhD (physics) in LaTeX and I indeed needed to compile twice (at least) to have a correct DVI file.

It was 25 years ago, though, but apparently this part did not change.

This said, I was at least sure that I would get an excellent result and not be like my friend who used MS Word and one day his file was "locked". He could not add a letter to it and had to retype everything.

Compared to that my concern about where a figure would land in the final document was nothing.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#306

Post by yunohn »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #300
owlstuffing wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in this case the passes are manual!

so?

Dunno - to me it feels like the latex compiler should just run whatever it needs to for however many times until the output is done/usable, like basically all other compilers?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#307

Post by mollerhoj »

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…

it is not strange that these systems don’t do incremental compiles? Things are literally paged.. Why does newer systems such as typst do full compiles when a single page is edited? I know that all subsequent pages might be affected, but surely, one could workaround this by allowing sloppy but fast compile options for subsequent pages, that sacrifices correct layout for something decent?

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#308

Post by V__ »

aitchnyu wrote: post #115

Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.

I tried using ChatGPT for Typst a few weeks ago. I had it open and didn't want to search the documentation. The output was totally wrong it, functions which didn't exist and syntax errors. Your mileage may vary.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#309

Post by lizimo »

lol768 wrote: post #277
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.

Most of the documents are generated in an instant, plus we deployed this on Kubernetes with HPA, so high load isn't an issue.

The main issue I found with an HTML-based approach is that browsers are not designed for papers. It would be very challenging, but still possible [1], to customize the page layout, headers, and footers. Nonetheless, we have even more advanced use cases that only Typst/LaTex could cater to, such as displaying the table header of a table that spans multiple pages on every page.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_media_q...

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#310

Post by flokl »

mollerhoj wrote: post #307
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…

it is not strange that these systems don’t do incremental compiles? Things are literally paged.. Why does newer systems such as typst do full compiles when a single page is edited? I know that all subsequent pages might be affected, but surely, one could workaround this by allowing sloppy but fast compile options for subsequent pages, that sacrifices correct layout for something decent?

Well Typst does incremental compilation with the "watch" command which allows, for most documents, live preview.
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