[HN Gopher] TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024)
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TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024)
Author : fngjdflmdflg
Score : 130 points
Date : 2025-02-13 04:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (laurmaedje.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (laurmaedje.github.io)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I remember in word for windows (Either 2 or 6, not sure) on my
| 40MHz 386, you could watch it reflowing text if you edited a
| paragraph near the beginning of a multi-page document. It would
| correct for widows and orphans, which would cause surrounding
| pages to potentially do the same. It could take a non-trivial
| amount of time to stabilize, and if you printed a document before
| it did, you could end up with duplicated or missing lines at page
| breaks.
| natemcintosh wrote:
| This was a really great write-up, and gives me a lot of hope for
| the future of Typst. I think one of the best ways to overcome the
| enormous momentum of TeX is to point out its limitations (while
| still keeping an eye on Typst's limitations), and explain how
| Typst overcomes them.
| szvsw wrote:
| > I think one of the best ways to overcome the enormous
| momentum of TeX is to point out its limitations (while still
| keeping an eye on Typst's limitations), and explain how Typst
| overcomes them.
|
| One of the other easy ways to overcome it is to provide as many
| templates as possible for journals. I've used LaTeX for years,
| but would by no means consider myself an expert in LaTeX, as
| I've almost exclusively been able to grab a template from a
| journal or from my university, and then just draft in the
| relevant blocks, write equations, add figures, and, rarely, add
| a package. I would guess that there are a _huge_ amount of
| LaTeX users like me out there. I do all my drafting on
| Overleaf. I love TeX (and curse my PI whenever he requires that
| we use Word /365 instead of LaTeX/Overleaf)... but so much of
| the benefit, for me at least, comes from the fact that
| templates are readily available for any journal I would want to
| submit to; my masters thesis was built in a template provided
| by my university; etc. I don't have to deal with any of the
| cognitive overhead of styling and formatting (except for
| flowing the occasional figure) and can just focus on drafting.
|
| For me to even consider typst, it's pretty much a requirement
| that there is some degree of template parity actively being
| worked on. The most natural way to approach that would be to
| just sort every journal by impact factor and start working top
| to bottom; given that so many journals share templates due to
| being within elsevier, springer etc, it should be
| straightforward to reach a reasonable degree of parity
| relatively quickly.
|
| Getting the major publishers to support and offer their Typst
| templates would make me try it out immediately for what it's
| worth.
| jedbrown wrote:
| Many journals require LaTeX due to their post-acceptance
| pipeline. I use Typst for letters and those docs for which my
| PDF is the final version (modulo incomplete PDF/A in Typst),
| but for many journals in my field, I'd need a way to "compile
| to LaTeX" or the journal would need to implement a post-
| acceptance workflow for Typst (I'm not aware of any that
| have).
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly - they require LaTeX not only to make it match the
| style, but because the final document is a prepared LaTeX
| work. Sometimes you can even see all the hooks and such
| that are waiting for \include and similar.
| szvsw wrote:
| Right, I guess that's my point: If Typst wants to compete
| with LaTeX, IMO it needs some sort of mechanism by which
| journals will deem a Typst submission acceptable, along
| with readily available templates for said submissions.
| That's a _big_ hill to climb probably, but probably the
| single most valuable development they could achieve from a
| product diffusion perspective.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Typst doesn't even have a stable release yet. Give it
| some time, I genuinely believe it will get there.
| gnatolf wrote:
| Interestingly enough, e.g. Elsevier accepts latex but has
| their own typesetting backend. Which typically means that
| the last editing steps are quite annoying, because even if
| one is using the provided latex templates, what actually
| happens for the final typesetting is done by some
| mechanical turk editor on a slightly different publishing
| system.
| coliveira wrote:
| One of the big benefits of LaTeX is the ecosystem of
| packages, but that only happens because so much effort was
| put into creating a package mechanism for the typesetting
| system. LaTeX has a long history of providing the technical
| infrastructure for package creation, and that was one of the
| main focus since its inception. No typesetting system can
| compete with LaTeX without a focus on package and template
| creation. My personal view is that LaTeX will continue to be
| king in this area for the foreseeable future.
| tkuraku wrote:
| This is exactly right. I like latex not because it's super
| ergonomic, but if I use a template I don't have to think
| about any formatting.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Yeah, exactly. Having used LaTeX for around two decades, I'm
| really eager for something to replace it, because honestly,
| it's very old and it shows (for example, among many other
| issues, dealing with non-English characters is still a pain,
| in spite of hack upon hack upon hack).
|
| But if there is no available template for the venues where I
| publish (in my case mostly conferences, although also some
| journals) it's not feasible for me to replace it. Maybe I
| could for slide presentations, posters or other documents
| that I design from scratch, but I'd say that's no more than
| 20% of the time I spend with LaTeX. The majority of the time
| I'm working with conference or journal templates.
| sa46 wrote:
| > As we've seen, TeX's model falls short on everything that
| requires knowledge of exact vertical positions:
|
| Interestingly, classical CSS had a similar limitation, that
| height is determined by content size, leading practitioners to
| search for the Holy Grail [1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design)
| Sharlin wrote:
| Not surprising, of course, given that both are (originally)
| _document_ -layout systems first and foremost, and given that
| we write horizontal lines, the primary layouting constraint has
| always been the width of the page/monitor/clay tablet/whatever,
| and the text (and possible other content) then just flows to
| whatever "height" is required (or until one runs out of space).
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Also interestingly, Chrome began supporting pagination
| recently[0] which until now required something like pagedjs. I
| wonder to what extent Typst's (or TeX's) layout model can map
| onto CSS now. I would assume concepts like widow and orphan
| prevention are not implemented but I haven't looked into it.
|
| [0] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/print-margins
| zellyn wrote:
| For reference, this blog post appears to be by the same person
| who is the overwhelmingly primary contributor to Typst: See
| https://github.com/typst/typst/graphs/contributors
| leothelion_ wrote:
| One of the two founders of Typst project, in fact
|
| https://typst.app/about/
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| I love a lot about Typst. Hope it keeps growing and getting
| better!
| n_eutrino wrote:
| life is short, use typst.
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