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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

#61

Post by __mharrison__ »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #42
__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)…

To be honest, I don't know if I've seen conflicting packages.

Do you have specific examples?

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

#62

Post by __mharrison__ »

smartmic wrote: post #18
Animats wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. The problem is that extending Markdown syntax gets messy. #figure( image("image.jpg", width: 70%), caption: [ Observe the image in the picture ], ) This is kind of a strange blend of Markdown, CSS, JSON, and HTML. TeX at least has a consistent syntax.

These 6 lines actually put me off. Probably I have to read more about Typst syntax but, same for me, consistent syntax which covers necessary complexity wins over bending a markup language for purposes for which it was never intended.

It's a little odd at first. I would recommend reading through the tutorial (which is quite good) and you might start to see some of the method to the madness.

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

#63

Post by flakiness »

__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…

So your books are like these? https://store.metasnake.com/effective-pandas-book

Jupyter-to-PDF sounds like a perfect match here!

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

#64

Post by akoboldfrying »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #61
akoboldfrying wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

To be honest, I don't know if I've seen conflicting packages. Do you have specific examples?

It's been a while, but I vaguely remember that the hyperref LaTeX package for making URLs didn't play nicely with certain other packages -- possibly with one of the citation packages.

Sorry I can't be more specific. I definitely have memories of reordering \usepackage{} statements until "it worked"...

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

#65

Post by justinpombrio »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #42
__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)…

I imagine you're projecting how LaTeX works onto Typst, though despite years of use and a PhD in PL I never really figured out how LaTeX works so I'm not certain.

I don't think Typst has a lot of global state to get corrupted. Like, if one package defines a variable `foo` and another package defines a variable `foo`, and you use both of them (and don't try to import `foo` from both), it's not like those `foo`s are going to conflict with each other. Is that the sort of issue that LaTeX packages run into?

Likewise, you don't modify typesetting in Typst by modifying global state like you do in Latex. You use `set` and `show`, which are locally scoped. You never need to, like, set the font size, then write some stuff, then remember to set it back. You just put `set font(size)` around precisely the stuff you want to be bigger.

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

#66

Post by Vt71fcAqt7 »

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…

One of the worst things about LaTeX is its reliance on packages to do anything useful. In fact, LaTeX is itself essentially just a set of packages for Tex. I hope whatever replaces LaTeX finds a solution that covers as many usecases as possible without needing any packages.

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

#68

Post by justinpombrio »

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…

You can do that in a couple different ways in Typst. First, if the user passes content into the template, then it's the user's content that ultimately gets to choose its styling. That is, there are three places that a style can be set:

1. In the content passed that the user passes to the template

2. In the template itself

3. By the user, outside the template

They take priority in that order.

OTOH, if the template really wants control, it can take optional styling arguments with defaults, and do as it likes with them. And if it wants content from the user that the user doesn't get to style, it can take that content as a string.

It's a fantastic system, so far as I've seen.

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

#69

Post by tolerance »

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…

Writing Typst in Emacs is pretty easy with this setup.

https://codeberg.org/meow_king/typst-ts-mode/wiki/

https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/tinymist/tree/main/editors...

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

#70

Post by gumbojuice »

sshine wrote: post #13
alphazard wrote: post #2

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this. The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often. Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more simi…

Places I’ve switched from LaTeX to Typst: My resume, research papers. Markdown was never a serious contender for my resume, since I want to control the rendering and the layout. Places I’ve switched from Markdown to Typst: Slides. There are some okay Markdown-to-HTML solutions, but they have this unfortunate side-effect that you move the slides to some other computer, and something breaks in your rendering. PDFs ftw.

Are there journals/conferences that accept typst for typesetting yet? It is probably my main reason for staying in LaTeX.
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