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Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

mickael.canouil.fr

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Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#81

Post by josephg »

Certhas wrote: post #27
josephg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right; but markdown has expanded beyond that niche. Lots of projects use markdown for other stuff - like mdbook, or for blogs. I think markdown is a great format for readme files. But for real documentation, the added features of typst are fantastic. Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of oth…

What's the state for generating websites from Typst?

Typst has experimental support for html in the recent versions.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#82

Post by tlarkworthy »

adamnemecek wrote: post #14
tlarkworthy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's extensible, you can put HTML in it, and HTML is extensible.

That is like saying "Ruby is not slow, you can write native extensions in C". No, Markdown is not extensible.

Ruby is extensible as well, these things flourish because their creators thought hard about escape hatches. The things that are not extensible we don't talk about because they already died.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#83

Post by applicative »

harshreality wrote: post #68
applicative wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been theoretically precise published specs for serious markdowns for 15 years. The commonmark convention is a common specification for many including e.g the familiar simple github variant, which emphatically does have a completely perfect specification.

Commonmark isn't serious because it doesn't include several major quality of life improvements like [^1] for footnote/reference syntax. Pandoc should be the serious "common" markdown standard.

It is perfectly serious, though hobbled by various recalcitrant forces. For example, if I write using only ye olde original markdown devices, pandoc will render as it would commonmark. The core commonmark idea is to have an unambiguous specification of /the original syntax/ -- which emphatically didnt exist: the perl regex script was the only actual specification.

Part of the problem is that people want to say 'markdown' but John Gruber, pissing on the corpse of Aaron Schwarz, falsely claims total possession of everything that comes under that head, and that there must be no independent specification. This simple fact totally destroys the entire milieu. 80% of complaints about 'markdown' are due to his recalcitrance. Thus there can be no spec, no spec specifying extensions, etc. He does not want anything like html to be defined as he will lose ... I'm not sure what, since he is deeply evil, as this one case shows with total clarity. Industrial interests would be enough to get an html-like convention if it were otherwise.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#84

Post by applicative »

harshreality wrote: post #60
applicative wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers…

How are you doing meaning-aware pagination if you're zipping together markdown columns? A few minutes of asking an AI and writing a pair of simple typst docs with a few sections of #lorem() paragraphs resulted in what I think your ad-hoc scripting (in what language? add and your custom scripting to your collaborators' publishing stack) efforts do: a typst meta-document that pairs two simpler typst documents, section…

//I'm not doing pagination//, that was my whole point.

My own attempt to put a typst in deepl failed immediately as 'lang:en' when to 'long:en' and it just kept going, five or six failures in a tiny document.

The markdown files never have problems distinct from translation problems, except e.g. with setext headers. There is a reason for this, and it is in fact the reason why the tokenizing world of ai has a secret love of md.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#85

Post by applicative »

josephg wrote: post #79
applicative wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers…

> you have literally just made something up. Huh? I’ve authored a couple academic articles in typst. At its base, typst is very similar to markdown. You use == for section headers, * for italics and so on. I authored articles in typst just as I would in markdown. Then I do another pass later filling in tables and figures, editing and doing typesetting. It works great. Maybe not for your needs, but it works great for…

Except what you made up was something about markdown and latex, if you look, not something about typst. I gathered you know typst and said not a thing about your cognitions specific to it.

I wish you luck with e.g. automated translation and editing of your typst documents, and look forward to the compile fails when you use 'html support' on these translated files. There are many curiosa with the markdowns but also very very very deep reasons for the uptake, which is only increasing with the AIs.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#86

Post by applicative »

_flux wrote: post #55
applicative wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.

Typst html support is already available as an experimental feature, so e.g. EPUB probably isn't too much work in addition to that (as I understand it, it's basically zipped HTML with some metadata). It's also in the roadmap: https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export . If the translator has access to a service like typst.app, then I don't see too many obstacles for translating. But I don't have any experie…

Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#87

Post by applicative »

josephg wrote: post #80
applicative wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.

I’ve never seen a markdown based workflow which supports the features I listed. If I’m wrong, it would be easy to demonstrate it by citing some tools. Just calling me a liar for disagreeing with you will convince nobody.

> Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly!

it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup - and you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles, calling a C compiler, etc. Why not use microsoft word? I find markdowns irritating in many ways -- only those are not among them. Why would I want an intellectual document to be in a programming language?

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#88

Post by _flux »

applicative wrote: post #86
_flux wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typst html support is already available as an experimental feature, so e.g. EPUB probably isn't too much work in addition to that (as I understand it, it's basically zipped HTML with some metadata). It's also in the roadmap: https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export . If the translator has access to a service like typst.app, then I don't see too many obstacles for translating. But I don't have any experie…

Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.

Perhaps you would enjoy the rest of the tooling, that may be useful in scientific contexts or in books discussing programming languages. Or perhaps you would also want to publish in PDF, like for an actual print book.

What kind of issues did you expect to encounter in translating Typst documents to other languages?

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#89

Post by josephg »

applicative wrote: post #85
josephg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have literally just made something up. Huh? I’ve authored a couple academic articles in typst. At its base, typst is very similar to markdown. You use == for section headers, * for italics and so on. I authored articles in typst just as I would in markdown. Then I do another pass later filling in tables and figures, editing and doing typesetting. It works great. Maybe not for your needs, but it works great for…

Except what you made up was something about markdown and latex, if you look, not something about typst. I gathered you know typst and said not a thing about your cognitions specific to it. I wish you luck with e.g. automated translation and editing of your typst documents, and look forward to the compile fails when you use 'html support' on these translated files. There are many curiosa with the markdowns but also ve…

No, latex does not resemble markdown while authoring. Text ends up intermingled with ugly \sectionheader tags everywhere.

Re: automated translation, you’re projecting your requirements onto me. I can see how automatic translation would be difficult with typst. But, I don’t translate my blog into multiple languages. So that doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is the requirements I listed above - like numbered figures, captions on my images, programmatically generated tables, footnotes and so on.

You repeatedly claimed you can do this stuff with markdown. I don’t believe you.

Re: Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst

#90

Post by josephg »

applicative wrote: post #87
josephg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never seen a markdown based workflow which supports the features I listed. If I’m wrong, it would be easy to demonstrate it by citing some tools. Just calling me a liar for disagreeing with you will convince nobody.

> Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly! it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup - and you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you mean…

> it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup

Yes, I've been quite clear on that point. Markdown isn't powerful enough for some of the writing I do.

Upthread you wrote this:

> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years

If this were true, I would have used markdown. If this were true, you would be able to cite a good markdown based tool which had the features I need. You have not.

> you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

What a strange thing to say. Why would I lie? My needs are quite simple. I want a tool to let me write and publish beautiful essays. (And documentation and the like). Like this:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/

I tried really hard to make markdown do what I want. I wrote this with markdown a few years ago:

https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-go-brrr/

But markdown isn't powerful enough. For example, I want my diagrams to have captions. And I want to be able to reference to my diagrams from the body - eg "In Diagram 3, ...." and have the diagram in a little box which says "Diagram 3" at the top. And if you click a diagram, it should open a lightbox. I tried a bunch of markdown tooling, but none of it did what I wanted. The bare-bones styling of that webpage is a result of me getting fed up fighting markdown. And I just hit publish.

> It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles

Bruh what? I want a good authoring tool. Something that lets me write words and render them as a beautiful webpage. Markdown is great for project readmes and things like that. But markdown is a bad tool for the rich, long form essays I want to write. The fact you don't know that isn't evidence that I'm lying. It's just evidence that you're ignorant about the tools I - and others - need to do our jobs.

If you're confused about my tool choice, some curiosity and humility would serve you better than vitriol.

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