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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

#311

Post by film42 »

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…

Thanks for your comment! I have a few PDFs that I need to generate for groups of users every so often and since wkhtmltopdf is considered EOL, I've been forced to use chrome (which sucks to manage). I just rewrote that code to use Typst (via the typst gem) and it's so so so much better.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#312

Post by codeape »

tiffanyh wrote: post #246
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.

No, I like Markdown.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#313

Post by codeape »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #280
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 usi…

Using a word processor (MS Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice Writer) is nearly as bad as using LaTeX (in some cases, worse).

Using a plain-text format like Markdown, ReStructuredText or AsciiDoc is likely better in almost all cases.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#314

Post by codeape »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #263
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?

Imagine the rapid advancements we could make in those fields if researchers stop wasting time on a baroque, outdated typesetting system.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#315

Post by OkayPhysicist »

codeape wrote: post #313
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usi…

Using a word processor (MS Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice Writer) is nearly as bad as using LaTeX (in some cases, worse). Using a plain-text format like Markdown, ReStructuredText or AsciiDoc is likely better in almost all cases.

Plain text formats like Markdown work great if you don't care at all about the specifics of the final formatting. Tools like LaTeX are for when you care deeply that the resulting document follows a certain format, but don't want to think about that formatting while writing.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#316

Post by IshKebab »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #249
IshKebab wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proc…

> Using PDF as an input format would make editing and typesetting practically impossible.

But they don't do any editing or typesetting. They say "use our template" and "the author's second initial needs to be italic in citations". That's my whole point.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#317

Post by optionalsquid »

yunohn wrote: post #306
almostgotcaught wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Imagine that your C or C++ compiler gave incorrect output, until you had run it some number of times. And that the number of runs required wasn’t obvious to the average user, so people just ran it again and again, to be safe. It’s absurd, yet we accept it for latex

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#318

Post by catgary »

nextos wrote: post #65
catgary wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to have to disagree with you there. The compile times are long, the error messages are worse than useless, and tikz diagrams are almost always unreadable messes. Large swathes of mathematics, computer science, and physics involve notations and diagrams that are genuinely hard to typeset, and incredibly repetitive and hard to read if you don’t make heavy use of the macro system. Integrating some actual progr…

> Integrating some actual programming features could be a game changer. LuaTeX already lets you embed Lua code and it is really good. However, I do agree some usability improvements are needed.

Have you ever looked at a category theory or differential geometry paper? It just doesn’t feel like you appreciate what people are up against.

Look at this thing: https://images.app.goo.gl/4WHN9Pqupxkk8Z3j7

And that’s before you get into stuff like categories of spans, etc.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#319

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#320

Post by rcpt »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #266
rcpt wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But how is typist better?
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