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I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

fransskarman.com

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Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#3

Post by Svoka »

I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo.

Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#4

Post by WhyNotHugo »

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX.

My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work.

I still have no idea what was going on, and most makefiles out there seem to be obscenely complex and simply parse the output and run the same commands again if a certain set of errors occurred.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#5

Post by shusaku »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#7

Post by pcfwik »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy to gitignore.

https://mgeier.github.io/latexmk.html#running-latexmk

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#8

Post by nomel »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #6

I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly. Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.

mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point.

[1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/

Re: I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

#10

Post by jeffparsons »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #4

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have…

I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago:

    if [ -z "$(find . -name "*.bib" -print0)" ]; then
        # Just two runs, to cover TOC building, etc.
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    else
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        bibtex "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    fi
So I guess if you're using bibtex, then you need to run it three times, but otherwise only twice?

This is to say... I'm glad those days are gone.

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