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Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

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Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India are required to generate this document called “Contract Notes” which includes all the trades done by the user on the stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this has to be emailed to every user before the next trading session begins.

Does the law specify PDF? I would have thought pain text or even HTML would be sufficient.

PDF is less likely to contain executable malicious code than other formats.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#92
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what GP had in mind, but one can programmatically generate PDFs directly, without using something like Typst as a "middleman".

Have you tried doing that? It’s no fun at all and far from easy. I don’t quite see a benefit in doing it without some utility.

Besides, the generation of PDF reports is usually decoupled from the templates, so you will have to work on your own "middleman".

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#93
post #84

Typst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we’re very happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every night and experimented with various solutions—from Puppeteer for HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn’t a pleasant developer experience, but with T…

Have you tried reportlab as well? It was a good solution when I had to deal with a similar problem many moons ago. Not quite the same volume you have but still.

Having used ReportLab a bunch, I'd agree it's a good solution, but not maybe on the more mediocre side of good. Generating LaTeX was a better solution for me, and while I haven't used it, Typst looks a lot better.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#95

I'm surprised to see that HTML output is currently in progress, and was not a core feature from the start. [0] LaTeX's awkward relationship with the web seems like something a competing greenfield project would try to nail right out of the gate (to mix metaphors painfully). [0] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721

I assume you know that tex predates the web by many years?

So? If I'm a modern user who needs my typesetting system to generate HTML, I'm not going to "forgive" a typesetting system because it's older than the web and use it even though it doesn't do what I need.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#96
I'm following the progress of this package, I would not mind a more modern successor to LaTeX. I'm an academic, and I actually do not mind LaTeX. I find actually writing LaTeX to be fairly natural. But every time I come to the programmatic interface I feel like there's a lot of room for improvement and that's the most exciting aspect of typst.

I cannot, reasonably, start using this for work until journals begin accepting papers in the format. But I am following until either that starts happening, or some workaround exists.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#97
post #87

Unfortunately out of the box typst is missing an important layout features compared to Latex: the auto-generation of headers (showing the section name in the header). There are some packages that help you with that: - https://typst.app/universe/package/hydra , - https://typst.app/universe/package/chic-hdr - https://typst.app/universe/package/wonderous-book However I believe this functionality should be available in t…

Practically nothing in Latex comes out of the box. Sure, you can bang out markdown-esque formatted text, but the moment you need something more complicated, say URLs, graphics, resize the margins, etc you are likely going to be pulling in a package. No true scotsman and all that, but I suspect few documents in the wild are bare Latex.

But the feature I'm talking about comes out of the box. One just writes

\documentclass[twoside]{article}

\pagestyle{headings}

in LaTeX. And this also does the right thing on special pages like table of content, appendix, bibliography etc.

Implementing all that in Typst is quite a hassle.

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#98

I'm following the progress of this package, I would not mind a more modern successor to LaTeX. I'm an academic, and I actually do not mind LaTeX. I find actually writing LaTeX to be fairly natural. But every time I come to the programmatic interface I feel like there's a lot of room for improvement and that's the most exciting aspect of typst. I cannot, reasonably, start using this for work until journals begin accep…

Have you tried out Quarto?

Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

#100

I'm following the progress of this package, I would not mind a more modern successor to LaTeX. I'm an academic, and I actually do not mind LaTeX. I find actually writing LaTeX to be fairly natural. But every time I come to the programmatic interface I feel like there's a lot of room for improvement and that's the most exciting aspect of typst. I cannot, reasonably, start using this for work until journals begin accep…

Have you tried out Quarto?

I’ve been using Quarto for a few years now. It’s quite a breeze to use. Highly recommend to anyone looking to publish technical writing on their static site.
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