Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source

* The syntax does not use escape sequences for functions/symbols, i.e. phi instead of \phi or floor instead of \floor. You will inevitably run into situations where, for instance, you want to write the letters phi, and have to resort to some ugly hack to write the natural language. This is not okay.

* There is reasonable syntax for text-formatting in bulk (whole paragraphs), but if you want to format a single word or sentence, the syntax seems to involve way too much work.

A side concern: This uses a mix of markdown-style formatting (asterisks for bold text) and programming style formatting. Personally, I think this makes it difficult to visually parse complex documents.

I think for people who write LaTeX in this kind of professional capacity, the macro language is the killer feature.

But I could see fields light on formalism embracing something like this over Ms word, if there was a nice Toolchain for collaborative writing and versioning.

I understand that, just like any tool that has sufficiently many users, (La)TeX grew exponentially in terms of the number of features it has. I like the its core, and I also like the ability to write scientific texts somewhat conveniently. I haven't used Typst yet, but it looks to be something I wanted for quite a while: similar convenience to LaTeX and yet much more simplicity.

To be fair, though, Markdown + KaTeX and MathJax are kind of everything I need right now. Jupyter Notebooks can render enough LaTeX formulas for me to use it when I needed it, even in the university when I'm writing some CS algorithm overview/tutorial or need to do some calculations and hand it in with the explanation. Whenever we had labs in Physics I would do all the calculations in Jupyter Notebooks and that actually looked pretty good. And for my personal blog, I just set up the KaTeX + Hugo which I love: the convenience of Markdown + LaTeX is enough.

This being said, I'm sure there are many people who still have to write papers and would find it useful, but at least for me LaTeX is not a standalone tool that I would use anymore.

Also, part of the value that LaTeX has is an enormous amount of templates that I don't understand but I use them because I have to (e.g. when writing a thesis - it has all the right typesetting, formatting and so on) or because they look very good (I still maintain my Resume in LaTeX format. This is hard to replicate or capture with a new system.

EDIT: Oh, and also Mermaid.js which is now integrated into both GitHub Markdown and Hugo is wonderful for a very small version of TikZ. Although, it is very inconvenient for my taste, but it's still very useful.

Technically it's a driver, but in practice I'm just talking over a chip via SPI. It's weird and quirky SPI - I think this chip originally just had an I80 interface (Intel 8080 protocol) and then they added a SPI frontend that internally translates to I80. That means you have to SPI with I80-ish chip select semantics etc. which is not what the SPI APIs in the ESP-IDF or Arduino frameworks do by default (leading to things not working unexpectedly), so I had to "bit-bang" CS. Aside from quirks like this it was pretty simple and just following the datasheet to stream the right commands and data.

One thing that made it functionally worth it (aside from the hacking fun and learning) is that E-ink panels perform best if run at a particular drive voltage ('VCOM') that is determined at manufacturing time and attached as a little sticker to the flex cabling sticking out of the unit. I stumbled upon this while reading various data sheets, and as a result my custom code will set the correct voltage, driven by config. If I had used a random lib I probably wouldn't have encountered this.

That said, I've found there's very cool projects out there that go a level deeper. Instead of using an EPD controller like the IT8951 as a convenience, this project runs E-ink panels directly off a MCU by implementing the waveforms directly: https://github.com/vroland/epdiy

After reading the panel datasheets I find that approach quite interesting, and am considering doing fresh Rust impl of that as well.

The Spotify project looks cool! I dig the dithering style. Would like to try a multi-color panel as well.