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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

#91

Post by cbolton »

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…

I have a similar "user profile" and find typst a much better experience. It's true CeTZ is not as mature, but it's much easier to extend where it's missing functionality (because you have a nice, normal scripting language to work with instead of a macro mess). But math is the reason I smile every morning when I open my .typ files. It's so clean and readable, and a pleasure to write, compared to LaTeX. It's also not as mature so I can imagine some things can be tricky to do in typst depending on your needs. But it does everything I need, and is only getting better (I see that several of the annoyances I found are getting fixed in the next release).

Can't comment on the AucTeX part, I'm using helix and typst support is not great but good enough.

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

#92

Post by cbolton »

knuckleheads wrote: post #75

Typst is a lot of fun and lets you do some really cool stuff. However! In the process of doing that cool stuff, you may need to debug things and that’s when it’s no longer fun. There is no way to print anything out to console and debug anything about what is going on. People have asked for it for over a year now and the authors have refused/ignored their requests. I would be using it a lot more except for this. https…

The author of this issue is the main developer so I guess they want it done, just had other priorities.

I agree typst needs better debugging tools, but you're a bit harsh. It has things like `repr` that can often be used to inspect objects, and `panic` can be used as a (admittedly crappy) substitute for printing a value to the console.

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

#93

Post by Munksgaard »

I use typst to generate PDFs on the fly in my sass-platform. The only other reliable ways I could find to do that was by using LaTeX (slow) or various WebKit-based tools (also slow, and in carious states of unmaintained/deprecated). It works like a charm.

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

#94

Post by bboygravity »

necovek wrote: post #82

References 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 "…

Why would a user who types only in English prefer a system that was optimized for all languages?

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

#95

Post by cbolton »

necovek wrote: post #82

References 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 "…

Hopefully they'll improve the reference system and multilingual support. But if you want a simple number for a reference, you can call "ref(, supplement: none)", or if you want this to be the default for the @label shorthand syntax you can set it globally with "#set ref(supplement: none)".

Also typst knows the type of the referenced element. It's easy to write more elaborate rules that behave differently depending on the type. And the rules can also check the current language to generate localized references.

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

#96

Post by superb_dev »

bboygravity wrote: post #94
necovek wrote: post #82

References 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 "…

Why would a user who types only in English prefer a system that was optimized for all languages?

It’s better for all of us if we can collaborate with a common system. This tool will have to deal with other languages if it’s gets popular enough

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

#98

Post by Vallaaaris »

CJefferson wrote: post #34
njkleiner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are on the roadmap, apparently. https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-14933...

Both have been “on the roadmap” from day 1, with little progress. Many open source projects put “we should make our system accessible to disabled vision issues” on the roadmap, depressingly few projects then actually do it. Even latex, which in academic circles is famous for not having html output, nowadays produces more accessible output than typist.

You are right that it's been on the roadmap for a while, however, it's definitely very high on their priority list. The recent update (v0.12) contained a lot of necessary internal refactorings of the layout engine, and they've mentioned on the Discord that after v0.12, they will start work on HTML output.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

Jach wrote: post #74
__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…

> (I often had to compile twice due to indexing) This trips people up a lot once they do anything involving cross-referencing or bibliographies. But for some reason some people use latex for a long time and never hear about latexmk, which automates all that, and can even "watch" your files so you can edit and save and see your PDF refresh all in real time. (I've only used latex for papers or blog math, not big books;…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by mr_mitm »

justinpombrio wrote: post #65
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)…

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 go…

Typst uses pure functions, so they cannot mutate globale state
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