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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

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Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#41

Post by Onavo »

mbo wrote: post #40

First of all, I will commend the Typst community for attempting to rectify the trainwreck that is LaTeX typesetting. It appears that they have succeeded. So Typst has its own styling system, and its own scripting system, and plugin system via WASM... isn't this just HTML with extra steps? Not to mention that Typst doesn't support HTML export https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-14933... , which is a…

The key difference between print systems and web tech is responsiveness. Anything print related is primarily designed with dead tree format in mind, so the layout won't change, and you don't have to worry about text reflowing after editing.

It's also why LaTeX/PDF to HTML converters are so difficult to build, because the underlying engine has no semantic information about the structure (this may be changing with LLMs and multimodal setups).

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#42

Post by akoboldfrying »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #38

I've moved all of my LaTeX-based content creation to Typst. It's: - Fast—Compiling my books would take around 1 minute (I often had to compile twice due to indexing). With Typst, it takes less than 5 seconds. - Easy to write—I actually don't write it, I wrote a bunch of Pandoc plugins to tweak the output from Pandoc (I write all my books in Jupyter these days, so lots of markdown). - Easy to read—I've used LaTeX for…

With your experience of both, have you found that Typst has fewer issues with conflicting/non-commutative plugins than LaTeX does?

Because that's where I lose the most time with LaTeX: packages often mess with the (piles of) global state in ways that sometimes conflict, and the only "solution" seems to be that, if you're very lucky, sometimes conscientious package authors will try to "detect" (through various hacks) whether some other known-conflicting package has already been loaded and adjust accordingly. I didn't see any mention in TFA of any module system or even local variables in Typst to contain this explosion of complexity, so I suspect it will be just as bad in this respect as LaTeX is once there are as many plugins available.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#43

Post by quotemstr »

C-f r u s t RET

But of course.

I'd rather see effort go into improving LaTeX performance instead of creating some new incompatible thing in a trendy language. One could also imagine an Elixer-style "resyntaxing" of LaTeX that would preserve compatibility with decades of packages. I don't think a long-developed ecosystem should be given up lightly.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#44

Post by aniviacat »

Onavo wrote: post #41
mbo wrote: post #40

First of all, I will commend the Typst community for attempting to rectify the trainwreck that is LaTeX typesetting. It appears that they have succeeded. So Typst has its own styling system, and its own scripting system, and plugin system via WASM... isn't this just HTML with extra steps? Not to mention that Typst doesn't support HTML export https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-14933... , which is a…

The key difference between print systems and web tech is responsiveness. Anything print related is primarily designed with dead tree format in mind, so the layout won't change, and you don't have to worry about text reflowing after editing. It's also why LaTeX/PDF to HTML converters are so difficult to build, because the underlying engine has no semantic information about the structure (this may be changing with LLMs…

One could ask if responsiveness is relevant for documents.

You could simply use a static layout for your html, and then add borders or zoom (just like in a pdf viewer).

Then you'd have the editability, accessibility and performance of html, with the same responsiveness as a pdf (none).

I've never really given this much thought, but html could reallly become the standard file format for documents.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#45

Post by mbo »

Onavo wrote: post #41
mbo wrote: post #40

First of all, I will commend the Typst community for attempting to rectify the trainwreck that is LaTeX typesetting. It appears that they have succeeded. So Typst has its own styling system, and its own scripting system, and plugin system via WASM... isn't this just HTML with extra steps? Not to mention that Typst doesn't support HTML export https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-14933... , which is a…

The key difference between print systems and web tech is responsiveness. Anything print related is primarily designed with dead tree format in mind, so the layout won't change, and you don't have to worry about text reflowing after editing. It's also why LaTeX/PDF to HTML converters are so difficult to build, because the underlying engine has no semantic information about the structure (this may be changing with LLMs…

> The key difference between print systems and web tech is responsiveness.

True, but... we were very good at building unresponsive websites in the early 2000s. Can't we just return to tradition and disable a lot of the responsive behaviour that we've layered onto HTML with an off-the-shelf stylesheet? Hardcode some width properties, ya know? (This is not a rhetorical question, genuinely curious).

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#46

Post by Aaron2222 »

viralsink wrote: post #31

I like Typst, but I've had a couple issues so far: 1. The line spacing. It's not defined as baseline to baseline, but as the space inbetween two lines of text. Very difficult for an assignment with a prescribed line height since it usually refers to a baseline-baseline measure. 2. While having multiple columns is really easy, adding floating elements for the text to wrap around seems not possible. There's a reason al…

You can change how the bounding box Typst uses for layout is defined (i.e. set the top and bottom edges both to the baseline), then I would imagine the spacing would be baseline to baseline. Would need to adjust the space before a paragraph to compensate though.

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#48

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

sourcepluck wrote: post #37
vslavkin wrote: post #25

I've been looking into it. It's `blazingly fast` (aside from the rust joke, it really is way faster than latex), the syntax is more "modern", consistent, etc. The main problem is the popularity. It just does not have enough packages, at least for my use case. I mainly do a lot of equations (simple math), and a loooot of tikz (forest, circuitikz, pgfplots, etc.) [ https://gitlab.com/vslavkin/escuela/-/tree/main/5to?re…

> I use AucTeX, which is a really great, and gigant package to edit latex (+cdlatex) This is tangential, but have you any quick tips for someone looking to get started with AucTeX? I'm a comfortable Emacser who has started to occasionally think of some document I'd like to do in LaTeX (some maths questions for a student, or an overview of some topic). I've looked at AucTeX once or twice, and ran away thinking, oh, I'…

I’ve found that the best way to learn a new emacs package is incrementally: for something like Auctex, I initially just enable it for my latex documents and then I configure and learn features as I need them, never learning too much at once. Even with minimal configuration, it gives you some nice things like imenu entries for headings and a menu that surfaces some of the basic latex feature

Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

#50

Post by mixmastamyk »

YmiYugy wrote: post #29

In the very limited time I used typst it has been pretty amazing, but imho there is one missing feature that a LaTeX successor, but even more so, templating engine should have. Come up or adapt a format, that can defer certain styling decisions to the consumer of the document. Stuff like, font, font size, line spacing, citation style, double or single column, numeration style, etc. On a different note, we got to find…

That’s what html was supposed to be; probably still could. Epub uses it as well, though readers are not equivalent.
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