Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well maybe it’s good to make it clear that it isn’t markdown to avoid confusion? Also Typst has less syntactic sugar which also has benefits. More generally, I am really impressed by Typst’s abstractions. I have typset my whole PhD thesis in it without needing any external packages. It was so easy to use the basic building blocks and write a few extra functions for the rest.
Is your template/source available by chance?
Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
81–90 of 243 posts
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#82References in established systems like LaTeX work the way they do for a reason: you don't want to embed words in them (like "Figure" or "Section") automatically because it does not work across languages.
Eg. both the article and docs at https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/ref/ use an inline reference that wouldn't work in Serbian.
Serbian (and many other languages) have suffix declensions, so while "Figure 4" is "Slika 4", when used like "in Figure 4", you really need "u Slici 4" (and lowercase, really) instead of "u Slika 4" as produced by Typst.
On the plus side, it seems to use OTF locl tables for substitution glyphs for language, though it only partially works for Serbian (might be due to bad locl tables for LinLibertine which seems to be the default font).
I am sure it's not too hard to only get the reference number (eg. @foo.context.something?), but defaults should be good or maybe per-language?
I can see how they wanted to avoid authors having to hard-code the reference type if they change eg. something from an image to a table, but it's hard to make it smart enough for any language.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#83I'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…
> Easy to script—Okay, I did write some Typst the other day. I migrated my LaTeX-based invoicing system to Typst. I created a list of objects with pricing and count and was able to throw it into a table easily.
Interesting! Would you share your solution and/or tell us a little more about it? Thanks!
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#84This 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…
As a side note, TeX engine could support Markdown or HTML or many other syntaxes too: it's easy to redefine control character in TeX to be anything instead or in addition to "\" (I've actually done that with Plain TeX a couple decades earlier to allow two-byte UTF-8 input by making all first-bytes of valid 2-byte UTF-8 sequences into control characters).
So, LaTeX being "unergonomic" is only relative — it's pretty ergonomic compared to things like HTML but especially DocBook or TEI SGML/XML schemas, but less ergonomic than Markdown or even Plain TeX. However, it inherits the most complex part where it is extremely ergonomic from Plain TeX (for the most part): editing math formulae.
But it's also much richer in expressing intent than any of those, and from what I can see, compared to Typst as well — LaTeX is basically semantic markup for excellent printed output (where Plain TeX is excellent printed output with no semantics, DocBook/TEI are pure semantic markup, and HTML/Markdown/Typst are somewhere in the middle too).
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#85is this comparable to asciidoc?
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#86First of all, today I almost exclusively write all my LateX in overleaf, so a lot of pain of LateX distros is taken away. But the main thing was always good templates, so I found a collection of ML conference templates [0], that shows also that typst still has some issues with acutely reproducing existing styles. Also when having to submit sources, I guess cross compile to latex would be the only possibility (typically they accept Latex or sometimes MS Word)
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#87I'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…
> Besides the typst packages, it also lacks the editor packages. I am an emacs user… The typst editor plugin for vscode is pretty great. It gives you a split view of source & pdf, and you can cmd+click on either side to scroll to the corresponding source / rendered output. It also does things like give you autocomplete on fields from externally referenced json data. Obviously, that might be no help if you’re married…
Latex workshop gives an identical experience with latex
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#88First 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…
Publishing is heavily dependent on the output media, and multi-format output is still hard for anyone desiring a high quality output.
HTML is specifically designed as a publishing system for our screens and has mostly evolved that way (media CSS tags excluded) and as a web application UI language, along with some push into semantic markup (but TEI or DocBook are much more comprehensive when it comes to semantic markup).
Some of the large problems of typesetting printed documents (page layout, with hyphenation, figure placement, orphans, justification...) are simply unsolved (or badly solved) with HTML+CSS, and they are hard problems even if you focus only on them (TeX systems will sometimes ask you to manually "pick" your poison — if you've ever seen those black bars in the margins).
Some of the beauty of TeX box model could have been transferred to screens though (like tunable and collapsible whitespace), and to an extent they have, but TeX's model remains incompatible with the HTML/CSS box model.
The fact that no language does all 3 (UI for apps, screen rendering of documents, paper rendering of documents) perfectly or even acceptably well — not to mention a fourth class that's a mix between screen and paper: ePub/eBooks — should tell anyone that this is a very hard problem to solve generically.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
You can trivially define a CSS stylesheet that eg. hides all the interactive elements like INPUTs and FORMs, or renders tags like plain text.
But "H" in "HTML" is for "Hyper(text)", which really talks about the interactivity. And then you get a really bad language for typesetting that simply lacks a gazillion features of true typesetting systems like TeX or even Typst.
Re: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX
#90The two baseline criteria I have for better-than-LaTeX options are: 1. Maths support equal to or better than amsmath 2. LaTeX-style macros Both are needed to make writing large amounts of complex equations acceptable. There should also be something similar to unicode-math, cleveref and biblatex, easy-to-use options to control layout/style/output (including metadata).
I wrote a recent paper in typst. We ended up converting it to latex at the last minute to work with the conference’s submission guidelines, and work around a small bug (now fixed) in typst. But I would 100% use typst again. I wish it output html so I could use it for blogs & documentation. The maths support was more than good enough for what we needed, and I enjoyed writing it a lot more than latex maths. The macro-e…
LaTeX maths or amsmath maths? TeX maths != LaTeX maths != amsmaths maths, and usually what I see described as "LaTeX maths" is TeX maths (or a subset, when someone claiming "LaTeX support" but not actually using LaTeX).
I'm not interested in a programming language (though naturally being able to write plugins would be useful ala luatex), but a textual macro system. I have things like (which is one of the simpler macros):
\newcommand{\dt}[1]{\frac{∂#1}{∂t}}