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

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

#93

Its doomed to failure. Latex is horrible but makes beautiful documents and the relevant world either uses latex or Mircosoft Office. Why use anything else? Latex lives by the community of people who use latex for their work and to collaborate. All know 20 year old latex documents will be compilable in 20 years. No competitor outside of Microsoft can survive that.

> All know 20 year old latex documents will be compilable in 20 years.

Except it's not. For example, in 2021, the NeurIPS template compiled differently in different versions of TeXLive (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/598567/different-pdf...). To my knowledge this change of behaviour has not been addressed in TexLive.

> Latex is horrible but makes beautiful documents and the relevant world either uses latex or Mircosoft Office. Why use anything else?

And why invent anything new when there are already existing alternatives? Why invent C++, Rust, Zig when there already was C? Why invent Clang when there already was GCC? Why invent Git when there was already CVS? And so on. (Maybe not the best examples, but that's what I could think of on the spot.)

The point is that there are aspects in which the current solutions (in this case, LaTeX) fails, and new systems can address them, since they tend to have much more liberty in the design space than the older system.

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

#94
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have high typesetting needs, maybe WeasyPrint fits your use case. [1] https://weasyprint.org/

Oh my god, this is fantastic. It doesn't solve the DSL part but it does solve the output-to-PDF-using-CSS part. They also seem so nice! I guess I can clobber together my own DSL and then run with this. I can't thank you enough

Glad to be of help. Just out of curiosity, what's your use case?

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

#95
post #60
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow this is cool! I made a sort of similar e-ink display piece that shows your current song on Spotify - https://github.com/CampbellOwen/NowPlaying . Your project is making me want to try another e-ink project! I'm especially impressed with the overall polish of the enclosure and hardware, that's always my weak point. I saw you mentioned you wrote a custom driver for the display controller. I'm curious how you found…

"Driver" is in all honesty a bit overly braggy! 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…

Thanks for the reply, that's great info! I'll keep an eye out for the VCOM stickers, I had no idea that was a concern.

The waveshare e-paper screens I'm using come with some decent sample code for driving them, and I just found this Rust implementation that looks interesting as well https://github.com/caemor/epd-waveshare.

I do agree with you though that the idea of driving them directly with the waveforms sounds quite fun. I've seen some interesting stuff online where people have been customizing the waveforms to get even more performance out of them (maybe partial refresh would be fun to look into as well).

As someone who's only exposed to embedded development in a hobbyist way, that epdiy repo looks quite useful, thanks for linking that.

Now to find the time to add on yet more personal projects :)

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

#97

LaTeX is simple if you: - have a good template (most of the conferences & some other parts of academia provide this), - use a decent IDE (many LaTeX editors I tried in the past were great, now I'm fine with just vim), - stick with the basics (text, tables, formulas, images; it's easy to Google it). The last point is what matters the most. As soon as you want to change the margins, stylize the table in a different way…

I don't think the fact that you need to look up and copy recipes and download packages to do most complex formatting is a strength of LaTeX, and one of Typst's stated design goals is to make formatting composable enough that you don't need a package for everything. But guess only time will tell whether that works out.

The other selling point you're missing though is that Typst's compiler is designed for fast incremental compilation, which makes the Typst live preview and Multiplayer/Google Docs-style collaboration experience significantly nicer than Overleaf's, where a change to a large document could easily take 30 seconds or more to render.

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

#98

LaTeX is simple if you: - have a good template (most of the conferences & some other parts of academia provide this), - use a decent IDE (many LaTeX editors I tried in the past were great, now I'm fine with just vim), - stick with the basics (text, tables, formulas, images; it's easy to Google it). The last point is what matters the most. As soon as you want to change the margins, stylize the table in a different way…

> There are a few "solved problems" in computer science

It's like saying transport is solved when the wheel was invented. Yes LaTeX is great, but it lacks so many decent things, such as good error message, or incremental compilation. Typst is going in the right direction, not segmenting the space.

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

#100
So, I'm a moderately-experienced LaTeX user. What is the argument for me switching to typst? I read the repository's README, and would be tempted to consider it as a complete newbie with limited needs, but I couldn't find the compelling argument for ditching (La)TeX in favor of this. Especially given the size of the LaTeX community and availability and accessibility of (sometimes hacky) LaTeX solutions for a zillion situations.
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