[HN Gopher] I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst
___________________________________________________________________
I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 505 points
Date : 2025-06-22 21:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fransskarman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fransskarman.com)
| rossant wrote:
| Great work. Screenshots would be nice.
| Svoka wrote:
| 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.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the
| functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For
| example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to
| include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was
| otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell.
|
| I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native
| Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to
| current needs (or where needs just didn't change) is fine, but
| it's not the case of LaTeX.
| JadeNB wrote:
| XeTeX handles Unicode fine, but that's definitely one area
| where TeX shows its age and its extensibility didn't, I
| think, allow Lamport to make a real difference.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I have heard about it, but it isn't viable for me to switch
| to it because most academic journals and conferences have
| templates incompatible with XeTeX, or directly ask for the
| sources and compile them with pdflatex.
|
| This is the same reason why it isn't viable for me to
| switch to typst either, by the way. I hope it gains
| popularity and ends up as a standard displacing (or along
| with) pdflatex.
| JadeNB wrote:
| I appreciate your postscript. I don't use TeX or vim out of
| nostalgia; I didn't discover TeX until I was a senior in
| undergrad, and I think I didn't discover vim until after I
| finished my Ph.D. I use vim because it seems best for its
| tasks, given the way I think (though maybe I think that way
| because I'm old). I use TeX because I write math for a living
| and have invested a huge amount of time using it, so that it's
| become intuitive to me even though I know it wouldn't be for a
| newcomer, and I can't be bothered to break long-established
| habits until I know an alternative will be established
| everywhere TeX is.
| andrepd wrote:
| Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s
| tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least
| until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality
| typesetting with an emphasis on maths.
| commandersaki wrote:
| These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when
| comparing with LaTeX:
|
| 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.
|
| 2. Compiling is instant.
|
| 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust
| compiler suggestion style).
|
| 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1],
| [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring
| to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means
| navigating long item entries is much easier.
|
| 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify
| macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify
| the macros close to where you need them.
|
| 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you
| use semantic line breaks.
|
| 7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc.,
| footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't
| specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you
| can specify the macros close to where you need them.
|
| You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's
| packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}.
|
| > 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if
| you use semantic line breaks.
|
| TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic line breaks and
| version control should work equally well with both LaTeX and
| Typst.
|
| (I agree with all your other points though)
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I think what the GP means is that whitespace is often not
| ignored by LaTeX, so line breaks can cause extra wide
| spaces between words. It's common to comment out the line
| break in LaTeX for this reason. This is much less of an
| issue in Typst (if at all) due to the separation of code
| and content.
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-
| use...
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| 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.
| shusaku wrote:
| The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and
| expecting different results.
|
| By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.
| tom_ wrote:
| My makefiles ran it 4 times, i think. I still preferred it to
| Word.
| lblume wrote:
| Anything is preferable to Microsoft Word.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| TBF Typst internally also recompiles a bunch of times until a
| fixpoint is reached, however it is designed to limit what
| parts can depend on the previous iterations and to reuse
| previous results for parts that definitely didn't change.
| a5c11 wrote:
| Last time I checked, flipping a coin twice gave different
| results.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Did you flip the coin in the exact same way? Probably not.
| pantulis wrote:
| If you flip it an infinite number of times, you will get
| the same results anyway. Call when you're finished :P
| Diti wrote:
| Aren't getting different results the norm in programming
| anyway? Developers usually don't make the effort to include
| idempotency and make builds reproducible.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| Normally, if you compile the same code twice on the same
| machine, you'll get the same result, even if it's not truly
| reproducible across machines or large gaps in time. And
| differences between machines or across time are usually
| small enough that they don't impact the observed behavior
| of the code, especially if you pin your dependencies.
|
| However, with LaTeX, the output of the first run is often
| an input to the second run, so you get notably different
| results if you only compile it once vs. compiling twice.
| When I last wrote LaTeX about ten years ago, I usually
| encountered this with page numbers and tables of context,
| since the page numbers couldn't be determined until the
| layout was complete. So the first pass would get the bulk
| of the layout and content in place, and then the second
| pass would do it all again, but this time with real page
| numbers. You would never expect to see something like this
| in a modern compiler, at least not in a way that's visible
| to the user.
|
| (That said, it's been ten years, and I never compiled
| anything as long or complex as a PhD thesis, so I could be
| wrong about why you have to compile twice.)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I wrote my PhD (physics) in LaTeX and I indeed needed to
| compile twice (at least) to have a correct DVI file.
|
| It was 25 years ago, though, but apparently this part did
| not change.
|
| This said, I was at least sure that I would get an
| excellent result and not be like my friend who used MS
| Word and one day his file was "locked". He could not add
| a letter to it and had to retype everything.
|
| Compared to that my concern about where a figure would
| land in the final document was nothing.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| Almost every compiler is a multipass compiler.
| owlstuffing wrote:
| But in this case the passes are manual!
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| so?
| yunohn wrote:
| Dunno - to me it feels like the latex compiler should
| just run whatever it needs to for however many times
| until the output is done/usable, like basically all other
| compilers?
| optionalsquid wrote:
| Imagine that your C or C++ compiler gave incorrect
| output, until you had run it some number of times. And
| that the number of runs required wasn't obvious to the
| average user, so people just ran it again and again, to
| be safe. It's absurd, yet we accept it for latex
| someuser2345 wrote:
| That's not the definition of insanity, that's the definition
| of practicing.
| pcfwik wrote:
| 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
| nextos wrote:
| LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed
| with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory
| constraints.
|
| Latexmk is one way to address this problem. A good IDE like
| AUCTeX can also figure out how many times the compiler should
| be invoked.
|
| Good IDEs will also provide other invaluable assistance, like
| SyncTeX (jumping from source to exact point at PDF, and
| back).
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was
| designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny
| memory constraints.
|
| That's certainly part of it, but any typesetting program
| will need multiple passes to properly handle tables of
| contents--you can't know a section's page number until
| you've compiled everything before that section (including
| the table of contents), but adding a new section to the
| contents could push everything ahead by another page. The
| only unique thing about LaTeX here is that it directly
| exposes these multiple passes to the user.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| As long as it's deterministic it should be fine. Run the
| commands in a makefile. Doesn't sound like the case.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| 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.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| There can still be cases where a fourth run is necessary,
| theoretically a fifth run. There are even cases where you get
| into an infinite loop, for example if you use the vref
| package. It will "cleverly" replace references to things like
| "figure 3 on the next page" or "figure 3 on page 8". When the
| reference is expanded, it might cause the figure to move to
| the following page, which means the reference is then
| contracted to "on page 8", which means the figure moves back
| to the original place again, in which case the reference must
| be updated, and so on ...
|
| LaTeX will usually tell you by including a warning in the
| output ("LaTeX Warning: Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to
| get cross-references right."), which no one reads, because it
| is so verbose. Not having that warning is not a guarantee
| that it's now stable either, so our Makefile actually
| compares the PDF files minus variable bytes like timestamps
| to know whether the build converged.
| Evidlo wrote:
| Just use Tectonic nowadays for compiling LaTeX source. It
| automatically handles these cases of compiling multiple times.
| Tmpod wrote:
| +1 for tectonic, it's miles better than the alternatives for
| every single case, in my experience. Development seems to
| have slowed down lately, which is a shame.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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 always feel like I'm doing something wrong when I have to
| deal with LaTeX and lose hours to fighting with the tooling.
| Even with a clean install on a new machine it feels like
| something fails to work.
|
| The last time I had to change a document I had to go through
| what felt like 100 different search results of people with the
| same issue before I found one where there was a resolution and
| it was completely obscure. I tried to help out by reposting the
| answer to a couple other locations, but I was so exhausted that
| I swore off LaTeX for any future work unless absolutely
| unavoidable.
| da_chicken wrote:
| I still dislike the idea that my document formatting and
| layout system really needs a build environment. Because let's
| be real, almost nobody actually needs it for genuine
| typesetting. I think the problem with LaTeX is that it's
| _too_ flexible.
|
| It reminds me a little bit of the problem of Linux
| distributions. Linux is supposed to be a system with the
| bazaar model instead of the cathedral model. Except what you
| actually end up with is that each distribution becomes it's
| own cathedral, because building a whole system now requires
| major decisions to be made. LaTeX class files feel like the
| same thing.
| jll29 wrote:
| Many people use LaTeX via Overleaf (a Website, cf.
| https://overleaf.com ) rather than installing it locally.
|
| That also solves the problem of having to install locally
| vairous extension packages or fonts - all is already there,
| and after writing a paper you may submit it directly to some
| conferences or journals from that Web GUI instead of having
| to email it or upload to a third site.
| veunes wrote:
| One of the things that really interests me about Typst is that
| the compile process seems much more deterministic and modern
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Why didn't you use latexmk? It deals with the recompiling for
| you.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| What do you mean by tooling? I've used LaTeX for decades to
| write books and papers and the combination with Emacs was
| flawless. The only major change for me was the transition from
| Bibtex to Biblatex.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another
| notation, at this point.
|
| [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/
| andrepd wrote:
| I'll only say that learning typst is easier than learning
| LaTeX.
|
| It also has first class support for unicode (as does LaTeX
| via some packages) which if combined with a suitable keyboard
| layout makes both writing and reading math source code
| infinitely more pleasant :)
| wenc wrote:
| Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but
| paired with Claude Code in VS Code.
|
| I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago).
| I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write
| sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember
| LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used
| everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the
| other stuff.
|
| Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell
| it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.
|
| Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The
| biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went
| wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that
| want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX
| replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package
| development time. Now they also have to compete with the
| millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.
| smaudet wrote:
| Great for code re-use but I agree, terrible for anything
| new.
| coliveira wrote:
| Which is good, because we don't want to deal with inferior
| solutions to typesetting that pop up every few years.
| lblume wrote:
| A slight bias in favor of the status quo might be
| acceptable or even desired. However current LLMs strongly
| favor traditional languages and are unable to comprehend
| even modern language features not part of their base
| training set.
|
| Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in
| the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps
| we would still be exclusively writing C today for new
| languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or
| conveniently. It's not just about Typst or typesetting
| specifically but programming language design in general
| and that improvements are becoming much harder to push
| through.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today
| for new languages' code could not been synthesized as
| easily or conveniently.
|
| I'm not actually sure that would be a bad thing? All the
| reasons that immediately come to mind to move away from C
| have to do with ergonomics and safety, the latter largely
| being a product of the former IMO. If an LLM can ingest
| my entire codebase and do 90% of the work to get me to
| the changes I need doesn't that obviate the majority of
| the motivation to change languages in the first place?
| afdbcreid wrote:
| If we get a completely autonomous AI it probably won't
| program in C (or any other human-understandable
| language).
|
| If it still programs in a human readable language, that
| means people need to review the code, at least from times
| to times. And it's much easier to review modern languages
| than C.
| okanat wrote:
| Have you tried typst at least once. You have big words
| but it is lightyears better than Latex.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| I've done some simple Typst programming via Claude, and it
| worked fine. I expected it to be ignorant of Typst but that
| was not the case.
|
| One of the best things about Typst is that most tasks are
| very simple. Compared to the reams of Latex BS I was
| replacing, building my book with Typst is momumentally
| simpler.
| rcpt wrote:
| Sure but if the LLMs are making LaTeX easy to work with
| then why bother trying migrate everyone to a new
| language?
| noelwelsh wrote:
| I think there are a bunch of assumptions behind your
| statement that I believe are not true:
|
| 1. Latex is sufficient for all document publishing needs.
| E.g. converting Latex to HTML is bad to non-existent,
| while Typst has HTML export.
|
| 2. LLMs are sufficient for solving all problems one can
| encounter.
|
| 3. Things that are easier for humans are not also easier
| for LLMs.
|
| 4. New releases of LLMs will not learn more about Typst
|
| At the end of the day I'm not trying to migrate anyone.
| Use whatever you feel is best. For my use cases I'm
| convinced Typst is a better option than Latex.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > why bother trying to migrate everyone to a new
| language?
|
| .. because a new language might be better?
|
| But moving forward it'll be harder to tell if any given
| new language is better than existing alternatives. LLMs
| burden their users with an almost insurmountable status
| quo bias.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Because LaTeX is ugly to write and not human-friendly.
| Adding an AI agent to the loop does not fix those issues.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I don't know about Claude, but when it comes to LaTeX IDE, I
| will always recommend TeXStudio over everything else. It
| handles all the annoying problems of LaTeX setup and
| compilation, and it provides a discoverable interface with
| classic-style menus (words, it has words instead of
| inexplicable little icons!) for various common tasks.
|
| I say that as someone who uses a tricked-out Vim for my own
| LaTeX workflow, and VS Code for several programming
| languages.
| kzrdude wrote:
| One relatively optimistic prediction would be that a few will
| accept Typst, but latex export from Typst will gradually get
| more mature, until we end up with a charade where more people
| use other frontends like Quarto or Typst that output to latex
| rather than latex themselves for submission into journals - in
| certain fields. Somewhere after that time, Typst will break
| through and be generally accepted itself.
| PatronBernard wrote:
| I hate a lot of things about LaTeX (also wrote several theses
| in it, as well as research articles), but the math syntax
| definitely wasn't one of them. Why on earth would they change
| it?
| gsinclair wrote:
| I think anything that is chock full of backslashes and braces
| can surely be improved upon.
| Maken wrote:
| You will end up with just a different escape character.
| tiagod wrote:
| I've used Typst to generate reports in multiple languages and it
| works pretty well for this! I just pass typst JSON with the
| report data and use it from there.
| lblume wrote:
| Especially in combination with file watching. Your script
| writes to the JSON file and the entire document and everything
| that depends on it updates automatically, often in less than a
| second.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Pro tips: type long content unformatted, or barely formatted,
| then ask an LLM to format it using your markup of choice, then
| clean up the thing it got wrong.
|
| They are very decent at inferring the context of stuff and will
| mark code, maths, titles so on farely decently. This lets you
| focus on the work of making it looks nice.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the
| actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the
| diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to
| me if your document is simple enough.
| aziis98 wrote:
| I successfully converted a typst report to md/mdx last week
| using this technique. For complex layout primitives I just
| told the llm to write a comment with a warning todo of the
| missing part it wasn't able to convert
| dkga wrote:
| Well you can always diff the document. If it's not too large,
| then manually inspect it. If too long, then pipe the diff
| into the clipboard and send it to another LLM to summarise
| the changes.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The LLM are already good enough to not do that anymore. Worst
| case scenario, you get wrong formatting, but not wrong
| content.
|
| Markdown + pandoc is not the same: you need already basic
| formatting. You have to think about the formatting. For
| example, math formulas and code are gnarly to type, so I have
| snippets for them to avoid getting out of the flow.
|
| But LLM don't need that, you can just dump your thoughts, and
| they format it.
| andrepd wrote:
| Jesus
| octernion wrote:
| i switched all of our pdf generation to typst - fantastic
| software. love how efficient it is; it makes previewing trivial
| and iteration very fast.
| brtv wrote:
| Interesting! Did you use a tool to do the conversion
| automatically? How did it pick up on custom packages and
| styling?
| octernion wrote:
| well it was a mix of word and markdown files being converted
| before; converting the word files was somewhat annoying but
| iirc i exported them and converted those. i wrote all the
| custom styling we used; pretty straightforward
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with
| typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you're into, I guess.
|
| But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they
| spent months on their macros, I think "another hapless victim has
| fallen into LaTEX's trap." It's like an ant lion that feeds on
| procrastinating students.
| nailer wrote:
| I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the
| paper's usability on narrower devices which seems a very
| strange position for engineers.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with
| typesetting?
|
| Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark
| mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real
| work.
| xigoi wrote:
| > Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding
| dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid
| the real work.
|
| Accessibility is just as important as "the real work".
| thomasfedb wrote:
| I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have
| in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS
| supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand
| the typesetting.
|
| Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in
| 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.
|
| In essence, it's culture.
| wenc wrote:
| It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also
| why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents,
| even when prose is more appropriate).
|
| It produces documents that look like those produced by
| professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations
| in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very
| serious.
|
| It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first
| newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens
| but I felt like a "professional".
| pdpi wrote:
| > If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work
| just doesn't look very serious.
|
| Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word
| Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked
| janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional"
| tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course,
| LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people
| have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look
| plain _good_.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| Yet Word is leagues ahead of Google docs... ( _shudders_ )
| emmelaich wrote:
| There are add-ons for Gdocs. This is apparently pretty
| good. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autola
| tex_equat...
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I don't know if this is still the case or not but equations
| in Word can be upgraded to MathType. IIRC the Word
| equations were a basic version of MathType (i.e. developed
| by the same people). MathType included latex syntax and
| much better layout and formatting. It was the only way to
| stay sane when working on journal articles with
| collaborators who gave less than zero interest in latex
| (i.e. physicians).
| com2kid wrote:
| The equation editor in Word straight up supports LaTeX
| now days. It also supports UnicodeMath, which is an
| actual standard and a pretty cool one at that. Sadly it
| has almost no adoption outside of Word.
| Skeime wrote:
| Last time I checked, Word was also basically untenable for
| math-heavy writing because there was too much procedure
| involved in setting a formula. This is fine if you need one
| here and there, but if you have lots of formulas (including
| many tiny ones, like just using the name of a variable),
| switching to a dedicated formula mode in the interface is
| just not pleasant. In LaTeX (or Typst), I just type $, and
| off I go.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| Alt + = will put you in the equation editor fairly
| easily, and from there you can pretty much use LaTeX
| notation.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Most universities don't formally train their STEM students in
| technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at
| the mercy of one's advisor's taste, for better or (usually)
| for worse.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Having tutored CS undergrads on writing, the lack of
| training (or care, or perceived relevance) was painfully
| obvious. Many were semi-literate wrt to English prose.
| bjourne wrote:
| That may be true in US universities, but in Europe students
| have to write technical reports in almost every course.
| Sharlin wrote:
| That's a pretty sweeping generalization. In the European
| university that I went to, CS students definitely didn't
| have to write anything longer than long-form exam
| questions until the bachelor's thesis.
| bjourne wrote:
| But less sweeping than the parent who generalized to
| "most universities". I think it was a long time since you
| went to university and times have changed.
| Sharlin wrote:
| That's probably true. It was definitely very unoptimal
| for students to not have practiced writing scientific
| text much if at all, and suddenly having to write twenty
| pages worth of it for their BSc. (More recently I did
| study another STEM subject for a bit and noticed that
| there was definitely more essay writing involved!)
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Not really for me in Poland - thesis was the only thing
| we had to write in a technical way.
| bsoles wrote:
| The first thing that my PhD advisor did, when I first met
| him as a foreign student, was to give me this book:
| https://archive.org/details/technicalwriting0000huck. And I
| am forever grateful for it.
| ykonstant wrote:
| For the record, at UIUC we had a bunch of seminar classes
| (and I think a regular class?) on LaTeX and technical
| document creation, ran by A.J. Hildebrand; it was a
| fantastic course and I learned a lot of folklore "secrets"
| that the manuals will not tell you, as well as technical
| writing tips that were far from obvious.
| api wrote:
| Given that LLMs can or soon will be able to turn markdown or
| word into LaTeX this filter won't last long.
|
| It's a dumb filter anyway.
| xigoi wrote:
| Markdown and Word don't have the tools to express what
| LaTeX can. Not even your deity of choice will ever be able
| to turn the former into the latter, let alone an LLM.
| senkora wrote:
| There's always the WordTex template if you want to create
| documents that look like LaTeX output from within Word:
| https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I did this once in undergrad. Used Word to make my term paper
| two columns and all formatted like a journal article. Felt
| cool. Felt legitimate. But I then felt kinda embarrassed and
| never really shared it with anyone.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work
| just doesn't look very serious.
|
| Sez you. MS Word 4.0 for Mac was perfectly alright, putting
| in less elbow grease than fiddling with LaTex.
|
| And you could get a PDF out of it, via the PostScript print
| driver.
|
| Never liked those spindly CM Tex fonts, anyway.
| agnishom wrote:
| > If you write equations in Word Equation Editor
|
| The experience is also awful. It's much better to write \in
| or \frac{}{} rather than to go to a dropdown menu and figure
| out which button to click.
| okanat wrote:
| You can use its own syntax for Word equation editor. They
| have even added Latex syntax support now. When was the last
| time you used Word. Latex support in equation editor has
| been there for ~5 years.
| int_19h wrote:
| I remember when I submitted a paper written in LaTeX to my
| math prof in college, alone in the class (nobody even
| mentioned it to us so it wasn't exactly surprising, but I was
| one of those guys running Gentoo as their desktop back then
| so...).
|
| She not only instantly recognized it, but, judging by the
| look and the platitudes she gave me on the spot, it probably
| earned me an extra point on the overall grade.
|
| When in Rome...
| nextos wrote:
| LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic
| Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and
| you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.
|
| Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all
| microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those
| make a big difference.
| __float wrote:
| What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall
| using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the
| examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem
| incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the
| reader.
| nextos wrote:
| It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font
| size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and
| excessive end-of-line hyphenation.
|
| It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe
| InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all
| those details.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better
| explanation and an example.
|
| IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without
| microtypography texts look ugly: https://upload.wikimedia.o
| rg/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Progr...
| Cordiali wrote:
| Sure, I don't like creeks like in your last example. But
| I absolutely prefer paragraphs, where the final line
| would be considered 'too short'. It also makes an
| appreciable impact for me, in how easy a text is to read.
|
| Which is to say, half of these things are pretty
| subjective.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable
| implementation, tweaking all those details.
|
| TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as
| well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as
| I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| It depends what you're typesetting--if you're using
| letter/A4 paper with 1" margins, then you're unlikely to
| notice any difference; but if you're using narrow columns,
| then it will _vastly_ reduce the number of paragraphs with
| ugly huge spaces between words. Margin kerning is the other
| big feature, but you probably won 't notice that unless
| you're fairly picky.
| catgary wrote:
| I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The compile
| times are long, the error messages are worse than useless,
| and tikz diagrams are almost always unreadable messes.
|
| Large swathes of mathematics, computer science, and physics
| involve notations and diagrams that are genuinely hard to
| typeset, and incredibly repetitive and hard to read if you
| don't make heavy use of the macro system. Integrating some
| actual programming features could be a game changer.
| nextos wrote:
| > Integrating some actual programming features could be a
| game changer.
|
| LuaTeX already lets you embed Lua code and it is _really_
| good.
|
| However, I do agree some usability improvements are needed.
| catgary wrote:
| Have you ever looked at a category theory or differential
| geometry paper? It just doesn't feel like you appreciate
| what people are up against.
|
| Look at this thing:
| https://images.app.goo.gl/4WHN9Pqupxkk8Z3j7
|
| And that's before you get into stuff like categories of
| spans, etc.
| Paapaa wrote:
| Typst does already support some microtype fetures out of the
| box and more are coming:
| https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6161
|
| I'd also not overemphasize the significance of microtype
| features. They might help with narrow columns but on wider
| columnds the difference is very small and most people will
| never notice them at all.
| wyager wrote:
| > Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with
| typesetting?
|
| Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they
| spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore
| developed a level of taste.
|
| Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and
| will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't
| value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In
| any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined
| endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined
| the typesetting was. Probably. It's the sort of ritual
| humiliation that academia specializes in.
| smaudet wrote:
| I'm not sure that it is as much about ritual humiliation as
| much as that, well, you are supposed to be at some sort of
| summit, so you must have refined your process.
|
| A mountain hiker can wear whatever, but above a certain
| altitude something must be true of them (fit, trained well,
| holding various gear, has supplies, or is in a plane/heli
| and probably even better trained/equipped/fit).
|
| I would hope that typesetting is just a qualia of an
| ordered mind not a goal of it.
|
| You can choose to feel "humiliated", but the truth should
| be closer to that you may simply be inadequate in that
| regard.
|
| I.e. it is not that using LaTeX (or even Typst) makes you a
| better person, just that certain types of people will tend
| to use tools, like mountain climbers likely use carabiners.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how
| refined the typesetting was.
|
| At least 1 [0], but that's obviously a rather special case.
|
| [0] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf
| xigoi wrote:
| Poor typesetting is like going to an interview in your
| underwear. While it may not directly reflect your skill, it
| says a lot about how much effort you like to put into
| things.
| blindstitch wrote:
| The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend
| most of my time thinking about the content.
| unbelievr wrote:
| Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and
| it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a
| doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other
| interested parties and they're all given the book.
|
| Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a
| PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the
| university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc.
| So you really, really want it to look right at the first go.
|
| There's been some progress the past few years now where you get
| to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it
| right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few
| WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to
| do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping
| some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.
| yencabulator wrote:
| WYSIWYG means what you're editing looks like the end result;
| LaTex and Typst are at the opposite end of the scale, being
| languages that compile into layout. No, a preview window does
| not count as WYSIWYG.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| This answer makes sense to me, because it is rooted in a
| functional need - the need to have a printing house consume
| the results successfully.
|
| Some other comments are oriented around aesthetics ("taste")
| or the state of other tools (Word, etc.) which I understand
| but those issues are more personal.
| porcoda wrote:
| Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written
| almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of
| packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university
| document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough
| to do on the subject of the PhD and didn't have the patience to
| burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros.
|
| I've found in the decades since then that my most productive
| co-authors have been the ones who don't think about typesetting
| and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like
| tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such:
| they get annoying fast.
| generationP wrote:
| Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind
| of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but
| perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you
| have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around
| putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed
| theorems or fancy headings.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Tikz is sometimes useful, but it can also be a massive time
| sucking pain in the butt.
|
| I mean it is one of the few packages that can actually
| manage to annoy LaTeX fans, which is really saying
| something.
| volemo wrote:
| I think the annoyance with TikZ is twofold: (1) it tries
| to do a really hard thing (create a picture with text in
| a human writable way), (2) it is used infrequently enough
| that it's hard to learn through occasional use.
|
| That said, nobody makes you use TikZ, fire up Inkscape
| and do it wysiwyg.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so
| much because you really do _not_ want to be stuck handwriting
| everything, but it 's not easy to be faster typing than you are
| with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of
| equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me
| to keep up with while typing than math was.)
|
| And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis,
| the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily
| you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a
| lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their
| typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I
| got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex
| header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends
| in my same major)
| duped wrote:
| On a total tangent, I found out that my grandfather's
| university digitized their entire library a few years ago
| including his masters' thesis from 1948. Back then it was
| written with a typewriter and by hand for everything else.
|
| I bet he could have done something more advanced if he had
| modern computers, but looking at it 75 years later and seeing
| his handwriting on the page was moving more than the content
| itself.
| generationP wrote:
| I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they
| illuminated their manuscripts.
| efitz wrote:
| I have often thought that LaTEX' distinctive font and
| formatting is either a virtue signal or an in-group signal.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with
| typesetting?
|
| Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport
| created LaTeX.
|
| Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools
| and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful.
|
| Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing
| papers a nicer experience.
| jwr wrote:
| Donald Knuth. Please.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Corrected. Thank you.
|
| Autocorrect incorrected it for me.
| ykonstant wrote:
| >Autocorrect incorrected it for me.
|
| I am saving this entire sequence for later use.
| rrgok wrote:
| It seems the grammar of the language was an after thought...
| It amazes me that he spent so much time perfecting the laying
| out algorithms that he could not come up with a sane
| language.
| roshdodd wrote:
| A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the
| ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into
| discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your
| document in an individual _.tex_ file and include it later in
| your top-level _.tex_ file. This setup works well with VCS like
| git.
|
| Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm
| running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX
| will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified)
| and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable
| to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting
| to update each figure individually.
|
| As the size and figure count of your document increases, the
| ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in
| LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the
| document.
| gwervc wrote:
| > The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this
| cost is "amortized" over the document.
|
| I'm still sour about the 3 days it took me to have something
| usable for my thesis, and I was starting from an existing
| template. And it's still not exactly how I want it to be; I
| gave up on addressing a bug in the reference list.
| aeroevan wrote:
| My school just had an official cls file, so my initial
| setup was just to download the template. So if that's where
| you're coming from (the journals I submitted to also had
| official templates), it's really minimal setup.
| otherme123 wrote:
| I wrote mine in Latex, along a team mate witting in Word.
| Her onboard was way faster, but she had to fight really
| hard in the end for Word not messing up everything on the
| smallest changes.
|
| Meanwhile, when I had a decent setup I could move a whole
| section from the intro to the results and the overall
| layout didn't suffer (floating tables, figures and code
| still in place, references still pointing where they
| should). I had code snippets with colour highlights
| imported from the actual source code (good luck trying that
| in Word). I could insert the companion papers with a single
| line of code per document, and they looked great. I even
| had a compilation flag to output the ereader version.
|
| My take was that Word enabled my team mate to kick a lot of
| cans down the road (but the cans eventually came back),
| while for me the reverse was true: build a decent
| foundation, and after that it was all pure write-cite-
| compile.
| vkazanov wrote:
| I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely
| math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes.
|
| In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all
| interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever.
|
| Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or
| working with an acceptable editor also helps.
| cycomanic wrote:
| From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word,
| I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who
| write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend
| more time on their layout than the people writing in latex.
| Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows
| for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the
| flow much more easily.
|
| Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with
| word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of
| discipline so instead you see people moving figures around
| putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to
| etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual
| writing.
| yusina wrote:
| > Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex
| allows for separation of tasks,
|
| I theory, yes. And that's also what I'm usually trying to do.
|
| What I have observed though with Latex folks is that they
| type 3 words and then look at the preview or re-compile to
| see if it looks good.
| gf000 wrote:
| I mean, as with code, the actual typing is not really the
| bottleneck.
|
| I also basically read the right pane rendered output, but
| mostly as a "reading out what I've written and evaluating
| whether it sounds good" most of the time, not really
| messing with layouting (especially that LaTeX and Typst
| does that very well, I can be reasonably sure that my
| paragraphs will have decent hypens and such).
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Well during 5 years of undergrad reports and papers, then 5
| years of PhD thesis papers, you do tend to hoard some useful
| snippets, it is more of a byproduct than a fixation... at least
| for me.
| __m wrote:
| It's like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that
| Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in
| terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed
| in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so
| even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the
| problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover"
| an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad),
| and then back into a brand new Word document.
|
| This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a
| moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for
| the nerves.
|
| Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text
| and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but
| ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into
| LaTeX's trap. :)
| berti wrote:
| I've run into this exact issue several times with group
| projects at university in the 2010s, and each time recovery
| was copying chunks of plain text from backup copies into new
| documents as you say. Luckily by the time we got to the final
| year capstone project the whole group was happy to go with
| LaTeX. Not sure if these Word issues have even been fixed
| since.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| I don't have a source for this, so take it with a huge
| grain of salt... but for some reason I have a memory of
| someone telling me that the older versions of Word saved
| and loaded documents by writing the bytes of in-memory data
| structures directly to files on disk, with not much in the
| way of marshalling or validation in the middle. Because it
| was fast, or something. You can imagine the kind of edge
| cases and oopsies that might result.
|
| The new versions at least serialise to some kind of
| monstrous XML representation of Word's internal state, so
| while it's not going to win any awards for world's most
| elegant document format, it should be slightly harder to
| corrupt in subtle ways.
| oefrha wrote:
| Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results
| (however minor). Actual research doesn't. It's the classic
| feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating
| students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly
| productive activities like typesetting.
|
| I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete
| waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.
| blitzar wrote:
| Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word)
| care so little about typesetting?
|
| I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all
| the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.
| xigoi wrote:
| > Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft
| Word) care so little about typesetting?
|
| Because its target userbase is people who don't give a single
| shit about typography.
| blitzar wrote:
| Yet every day all across the world the director is handing
| the document to their team telling them to work the weekend
| cleaning it up and make it look good.
| eunos wrote:
| When I was in college I found out that I have better reading
| experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer
| to read Springer published reference books rather than class
| recommended books.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word
| processor to have text be justified on both sides without
| inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified
| but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is
| still ugly.
|
| Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much
| better.
|
| And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX
| (IMO).
| electroly wrote:
| In Word, set the paragraph alignment to justified and enable
| automatic hyphenation.
|
| You can actually use LaTeX math notation in the equation
| editor in modern Word.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of
| students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint,
| note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly
| horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc..
|
| Obvious reasons:
|
| - Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you
| want it to look good.
|
| - You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks
| bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of
| care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels
| unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine.
|
| - Spending time on tooling _feels_ productive even if it is not
| past a certain point.
|
| - People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend
| time on it.
|
| That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn
| "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any
| macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different
| journal templates, so the less custom code the better.
| whatever1 wrote:
| I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software
| just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables,
| figures, references, equations etc. If
| Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person
| would sink 100's of hours in debugging latex out of memory
| errors.
|
| But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much
| prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another
| thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your
| multi-line equations.
| stared wrote:
| First, you have to (or at least - you had to). I mean, it was
| the only way to sanely include a lot of formulae and managing
| bibliography.
|
| Then you discover that is id beautiful. Honestly, even using
| base style sets you above the typesetting of books. With some
| extra tweaks, it is beautiful.
|
| Did I spend a lot of time on LaTeX during my PhD. Sure! But
| (even counting in all masochism involved into dealing with
| LaTeX) I both cherish this time, and the results.
| iNic wrote:
| People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just
| the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or
| chefs who care more about their knives.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| The problem with gearheads is that they can displace their
| passion for the activity itself onto the gear around the
| activity...and get better at having gear but not get better
| at the activity.
|
| E.g., guitarists who own 80 of the same guitar and spend many
| hours on the internet arguing about tiny variations in what
| Fender was doing in 1961. And then they put out a video and
| it turns out they can barely play guitar at all.
|
| I wouldn't exactly criticize them for that choice, but it's
| definitely a choice. Or maybe not a conscious choice, because
| the road to improvement is hard, but the road to more gear is
| loaded with honeypots of dopamine.
| gf000 wrote:
| Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your
| layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no
| chance of noticing unless a full review.
|
| And publishing is _the_ primary way academics communicate en
| large - it 's kinda important to be able write your specific
| notation without resorting to drawing on paper.
| commandersaki wrote:
| In case anyone hasn't seen some typst source and renders, here's
| a few documents I whipped up:
|
| First is based on Todd C. Miller's Latex Resume Template:
|
| - https://typst.app/project/rDUHMUg5vxl4jQ5q2grGPY
|
| Second is a Enduring Power of Attorney:
|
| - https://typst.app/project/rs9ZgGLhgM7iPvFs7PQv5O
|
| Third a will:
|
| - https://typst.app/project/r45dVk6MpLjsoXMvxkTxsE
| pityJuke wrote:
| Glad to hear Typst has people doing serious work with it.
|
| I've been able to avoid LaTeX. At uni, I went for org-mode ->
| LaTeX, which was OK except when my .emacs file was filling up
| with LaTeX stuff to make random stuff work. To be honest, that
| means I probably can't even compile it again if I wanted to.
|
| Typst has been awesome (always ran into LaTeX just being horribly
| inconsistent when layout stuff) when I've used it. Hope it
| continues.
| veunes wrote:
| Typst really does feel refreshing in that sense... way less
| fiddly and a lot more predictable, especially for layout tweaks
| vessenes wrote:
| I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine
| has some additional vertical control for long documents that
| latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving
| over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one
| area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but
| latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible,
| terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Maybe in another year or
| six months!
| dkga wrote:
| Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some
| Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?
| vessenes wrote:
| An llm friendly language spec would help, I'd guess. FWIW
| it's a common long tail language issue -- everybody's realll
| good at python and typescript, things fall off from there
| the-wumpus wrote:
| I understand why people like using LLMs for coding, saves them
| having to think, but it is deeply frustrating to see it being
| such a crutch that some people cannot use new tools without it.
|
| I suppose the issue is not new, many people didn't want to use
| new lanuages before because they couldn't copy snippets from
| the internet, but it was frustrating then too.
| vessenes wrote:
| You're going to be frustrated a long time into the future I
| would guess.
|
| I've been coding since before the camel book was published:
| at that time it was basically ask Larry Wall on Usenet or a
| local bearded guru if you weren't in a university setting and
| wanted to learn to code.
|
| I can hand craft code in many a language; I can also do fine
| wooden joinery. When a project has value to me in the
| completion and hours to completion is my metric then a cnc
| machine or an llm is a great tool, and allows me to make
| things that aren't "worth" hand coding.
|
| When I want to work on a technical skill or just get in the
| flow I code by hand or use my wood tools. Upshot: different
| strokes for different folks.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in
| anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they
| are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst
|
| I'm surprised to hear that--I've been using GitHub Copilot with
| ConTeXt [0] since 2021, and it mostly works fairly well. And
| ConTeXt is _much_ more obscure than Typst (but also much older,
| so maybe that gives it an advantage?).
|
| [0] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Introduction/Quick_Start
| vessenes wrote:
| I'll tell you my failing prompt - hopefully you can help! I
| haven't tried since 4.0 / o3 / 2.5 pro came out.
|
| I want a flowed book layout (so we have a facing page with
| inner and outer margins.)
|
| I am rendering chats in the main part of the page. Chats
| alternate left and right alignment so it looks a bit like a
| text conversation. For each chat I want to put metadata
| (reactions, sender, time) on the margin it is aligned to.
|
| So For a left chat, on a left page, I want to use the left
| (outside) margin. A left chat right hand page the inside
| margin.
|
| Two things I could not get sorted: first, perfect vertical
| alignment between the chat and metadata, ( I think this is
| possible but difficult) and a persnickety bug where the first
| chat on each page chooses the last page's proper margin side.
|
| Happy to pay for an answer - I did try to hire a typesetter
| for this as well.
| dkga wrote:
| Nice debrief. I think tough some of the downsides the author
| mentions can be addressed relatively easily with quarto, which
| has embraces Typst since its early days as I recall. Especially
| the bibliography issue.
| shrinks99 wrote:
| Very cool! I ran into the multiple bibliography issue when
| attempting to typeset my grandmother's PHD thesis which I was
| able to rescue from the 5.25" floppies it was originally stored
| on. I was planning on waiting until they solved this officially
| to resume that side project, but might give Alexandria a shot!
| thezoq2 wrote:
| That sounds like a fun project! Alexandria is the way to go for
| now but hopefully they will get proper support for it sooner
| rather than later.
| irundebian wrote:
| It can be hard to write macros with state in typst.
| lblume wrote:
| It is hard to write macros in LaTeX.
| freehorse wrote:
| What deters me from Typst is that latex math syntax is nowadays
| ubiquitous. You write $x^2=1$ and it renders in many places.
| Learning a new syntax for math expressions is simply not in my
| interests.
| the-wumpus wrote:
| To be fair $x^2=1$ literally works in typst.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The threat is literally the opposite, it is very freeing to be
| able to write typst syntax because it's quicker and easier to
| write. But then you're cursed by the fact that every other
| place now uses latex math syntax by convention.
| Paapaa wrote:
| It is very fast to learn the Typst math syntax. It is easy and
| intuitive and usually less verbose than LaTeX. It should not be
| a difficult thing to learn for most people.
| dleslie wrote:
| In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will
| be maintained.
|
| Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the
| general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part
| and implementing critical features in the closed source portion.
| Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.
| the-wumpus wrote:
| I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of
| what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and
| imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and
| everything you need to use it is open source.
|
| Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people
| who made the LaTeX project originally.
|
| I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying
| (assuming after the full 1.0 version so it's mostly
| maintenance) is that packages are automatically downloaded from
| the typst site, but an open repo can trivially be made
| considering that the set of packages used is just from a open
| source git repo and the closed source site just hosts tar.gz
| files of the folders in the repo. Not a big deal I think.
| dleslie wrote:
| They have a deep incentive to drive users to subscribe, and
| that's directly at odds with keeping all of the document
| rendering open source. It makes a lot of sense for them to
| provide document features that are only available to
| subscribers.
| the-wumpus wrote:
| They have some incentive to drive users to subscribe, but
| they have other forms of income, and I think if they ever
| implemented even a single feature of actual rendering that
| was closed source their community would riot and we'd get a
| community managed fork (probably by the guy who does the
| language server...).
|
| The only way they can continue to gain traction is if they
| never ever in any way lock people to the web app. Documents
| must be portable, it's part of why someone would want typst
| anyways.
|
| I do not see a future where this happens, and if it does it
| will be because the typst org has changed hands and is also
| no longer particularly relevant to the future of typst the
| language.
| ummonk wrote:
| Is there really a community of volunteer contributors
| that could fork it if that happened? Typically with a
| corporate-backed project like this, the corporate
| development tends to crowd out the formation of a
| volunteer community of contributors that would be able to
| take over development.
| gf000 wrote:
| All the typesetting extensions and such are a community
| effort. There are so many specific use cases that can
| only be/will be done by very specialized academics that a
| non-networked product would die on the vine.
| justinnk wrote:
| What you suggest seems plausible, but there is a very good
| counter example. Overleaf is also managing well by relying
| on the open-source LaTEX. What drives people to subscribe
| is not the typesetting itself, but the ecosystem around it
| (collaborative editing, version management, easy sharing,
| etc.). You can make money with those and still have the
| rendering free/open-source. I believe a similar thing
| is/will be true for Typst as well.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| That is a bad counterexample. There is a world of
| difference between the main devs offering a paid service
| and some unaffiliated company offering services.
|
| In principle, having a reliable source of funding for
| typst is great. However, as a journal this would make me
| hesitant: what if down the road some essential features
| become subscription-only?
| franga2000 wrote:
| It helps that the LaTeX ecosystem is such a flaming
| dumpster fire that you all but need a tool like OverLeaf
| to use it effectively.
| gf000 wrote:
| There is quite a clear distinction/border between an Input-
| Output rendering kind of program sitting beneath
| everything, and a web service providing stuff like
| collaborative editing, free hosting etc on top.
| agnishom wrote:
| > implementing critical features in the closed source portion
|
| Like which critical features, for example?
| dleslie wrote:
| For now, that's the entire collaboration component. It would
| make sense to build a portion of document rendering in that
| context which won't be found in the open source portions. A
| value-add to convince users to subscribe.
| moelf wrote:
| >For now, that's the entire collaboration component.
|
| And LaTeX has this for free? It's separated concerns, I
| think the analogy is Overleaf and LaTeX but just happened
| to be made by the same group of folks, it doesn't have to
| go down the monetization-at-the-cost-of-your-user route.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > And LaTeX has this for free?
|
| Yes, Overleaf is both free-as-in-beer [0] and free-as-in-
| speech [1]. The OSS version is pretty easy to self-host,
| but it's missing quite a few features from the paid
| version. I still prefer compiling from the command-line
| for most of my documents, but I run the self-hosted
| version for collaboration.
|
| [0] https://www.overleaf.com/user/subscription/plans
|
| [1] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf/
| agubelu wrote:
| Actually I've never understood the "free-as-in-beer"
| thing. Where is beer free?
| pedvide wrote:
| I've always understood "free as in beer" as: if someone
| hands you a beer and says it's free, you know that you
| don't have to pay to consume the beer, but that doesn't
| mean that you also get the recipe, brewing instructions,
| factory plans, glass making instructions etc. The only
| thing that is free is the liquid itself, nothing else.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| The term was arguably coined by RMS and his full
| statement was:
|
| > "Free software" means software that respects users'
| freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users
| have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change
| and improve the software. Thus, "free software" is a
| matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept,
| you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in
| "free beer."
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
|
| Sometimes beer happens to be free, in which case it is
| referred to as "free beer". It's just an example.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Lots of occasions, mostly celebrations or campaigns. It
| even has its own Wikipedia article:
|
| https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freibier
| poulpy123 wrote:
| often when you are with friends
| kzrdude wrote:
| The free plan on overleaf only allows collaboration
| between 2 people. If you have 3 students in your report
| assignment then you can't use overleaf for free.
|
| That sounds like a sign that overleaf is struggling, that
| they had to make that change.
|
| And Typst is more generous there, you can collaborate 3
| people with no problem.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > The free plan on overleaf only allows collaboration
| between 2 people. If you have 3 students in your report
| assignment then you can't use overleaf for free.
|
| Yup. You used to be able to share projects with unlimited
| people via link sharing, but they annoyingly got rid of
| that last year [0]. And Overleaf's cheapest plan is still
| more expensive than a basic VPS, so it's actually
| _cheaper_ to self-host (which is what I 'm doing [1]).
|
| > That sounds like a sign that overleaf is struggling,
| that they had to make that change.
|
| Either struggling or realized that they have a captive
| audience--if your professor requires assignments to be
| typeset with LaTeX and assigns group projects, there
| aren't really any other options.
|
| [0] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/changes-to-project-
| sharing
|
| [1] https://www.maxchernoff.ca/p/overleaf
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| i mean that's what overleaf does with latex too, so i don't
| see the difference
| xigoi wrote:
| Overleaf is open source.
| jeltz wrote:
| It is open core.
| eviks wrote:
| > neglecting the open source part
|
| So it's no different than fully open sourced projects.
| cAtte_ wrote:
| you are wrong. typst's lead dev has stated that an important
| goal is to have the CLI (which is open source) and web app
| behave identically, even refusing to implement such a basic
| feature as PDF embedding because, due to technical reasons, it
| is currently incompatible with this goal. [1]
|
| typst, the project, is not by any means a "mix" of open and
| closed, even if typst, the company, is. indeed, the most
| thorough LSP implementation available (tinymist) is not only
| open source but a community project. for another funny example
| see typstify, a paid typst editor not affiliated with the
| company. [2]
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145#issuecomment-17531...
|
| [2]: https://typstify.com/purchase/
| jorams wrote:
| I believe their intentions are good, and keeping
| functionality the same for different outputs to avoid
| fragmentation is good too. An alternative interpretation,
| however, directly in line with the fear expressed by GP, is
| that they're already crippling the open source CLI because
| they can't support the feature in the closed source web app.
| veunes wrote:
| On the flip side, new tools like Typst are trying to push the
| UX forward in ways that the LaTeX ecosystem often struggles
| with. I think it comes down to what risks you're comfortable
| with
| mayli wrote:
| Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex
| generated PDFs.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Yes, obviously. Do you delete all source code once you
| compiled a binary?
|
| Any future corrections, additions or other modifications are
| made to the source, not the generated old pdf.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| LaTeX is not as stable as people make it out to be.
|
| I don't know how many packages there are for working with
| tables, but 20 years ago, `tabu` was the most recommended
| package, until the maintainer stopped responding. Now the
| package is incompatible with almost everything else,
| leading to headaches when trying to compile old documents:
|
| https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu
|
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/470107/incompatibil
| i...
|
| Typst at least has dependency pinning out of the box. If
| you value reproducibility, you should invent a similar
| mechanism for your LaTeX documents.
|
| Also, I'm loosely following the activities around LaTeX on
| Github and Stackexchange and it seems that it's mostly
| maintained by three people or so (Carlisle, Mittelbach,
| Fischer), who - no offense - aren't getting any younger. I
| wonder how well LaTeX will be maintained if these long time
| contributors have to step down eventually.
| Paapaa wrote:
| Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license.
| It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with
| Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and
| that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst
| fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and
| cover development costs with the web app. But the actual
| typesetting engine is fully open source and free.
| meehai wrote:
| https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf hm ?
| Paapaa wrote:
| "That" in my sentence meant that Typst web app is closed
| source.
| mollerhoj wrote:
| But that doesn't make much sense - by your account Latex
| would also be a mix of closed and open source, since
| closed source web apps exists for writing Latex.
| Paapaa wrote:
| What does not make sense? Did you mean to answer to
| someone else? I only stated that Typst (the typesetting
| engine) is free to use and modify, and only the web app
| is closed source. Typst can be used without touching any
| web apps. I use Typst locally.
|
| I made no claims about any mixes or claims about LaTeX.
| malmeloo wrote:
| The Typst web app, which is similar to Overleaf, is closed
| source. Overleaf itself is open source, yes.
| kjoona wrote:
| Overleaf isn't fully open source either, since they have a
| paid tier with features which are not present in this repo.
| Inline commenting for example, is a Server Pro -only
| feature.
| jeltz wrote:
| Read your own link before posting. While the parent was
| wrong about it being fully closed source the Overleaf
| editor isn't fully open source either, it is open core
| under AGPL.
|
| > If you want help installing and maintaining Overleaf in
| your lab or workplace, we offer an officially supported
| version called Overleaf Server Pro. It also includes more
| features for security (SSO with LDAP or SAML),
| administration and collaboration (e.g. tracked changes).
| Find out more!
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. I wrote an academic paper a few months ago in Typst. I
| used the VS Code extension for live previewing. All totally
| opensource and it works great.
| thezoq2 wrote:
| That is a real concern, but I wouldn't say there are any
| critical features in the closed source portion. I wrote the
| whole thesis locally with only open source tools. One of the
| included papers was written in the cloud platform for
| collaboration.
|
| It is a concern that there is a single company doing most of
| the development, but there is quite a bit of community
| involvement so I don't think it is an immediate concern
| ykonstant wrote:
| >In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably
| will be maintained.
|
| The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like
| LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No.
| Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on
| handsomely.
|
| Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down
| the line it is possible that maintained forks will be
| controlled by big publishers paying maintainers to deal with
| the insanity of its internals. And we all know how lovely those
| publishers are (Tu tthYi tth)Tu
| shakna wrote:
| TeX Live started in 1996, current update release is March,
| and has active conferences next year. They're an open source
| group, that has so far survived the test of time, and I'd
| suggest motivations are there to keep that into the distant
| future.
|
| Unless academia collapses.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I hope you are correct!
| agnishom wrote:
| Congratulations to the author.
|
| I have to agree that Typst source generally looks a lot less
| uglier than LaTeX. I considered writing stuff in Typst many
| times, but I couldn't master the courage to do so.
| gumbojuice wrote:
| I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because
| journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they
| ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate
| it into their toolchains I guess?
| Zariff wrote:
| I'm not familiar with how journal submissions work, but don't
| you simply submit a pdf at the end? Does it matter what engine
| you used to render it?
| jltsiren wrote:
| You normally submit a LaTeX or Word document, and the
| publisher does the final typesetting. Even in computer
| science, where people often spend a lot of time tweaking the
| typesetting, the pdf generated by the authors is essentially
| a preview. There are often visible differences between it and
| the publisher's version.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah this is one of the craziest things about the
| scientific publishing industry.
|
| Journals justify their fees by claiming its for
| typesetting, but all they are really doing is adding extra
| work to nit pick bibliography formats and so on (see the
| comments in this article about sentence case). Nobody cares
| about that. I don't think anyone even reads "journals" any
| more (except maybe Nature/Science etc.). They mostly just
| read individual papers and then there's no consistency to
| maintain.
|
| In a sane world journals _would_ accept PDFs. They would
| check that the format _roughly_ matches what they expect
| but not insist on doing the type setting themselves.
|
| Oh well, maybe one day.
| aragilar wrote:
| I would note arXiv requires the source as well, and
| having the source is what is enabling the HTML
| experiments they're doing.
|
| On consistency, what the journals provide is some level
| of QA (how much is a function of field and journal,
| rather than the what is charges), and the template is the
| journal's brand, so both the authors and journals benefit
| from the style (I can tell the difference between the
| different (all similar quality) journals in my field at a
| glance by the style).
|
| It's also worth noting that there's a whole much of
| metadata that needs to be collected (whether you agree
| with it or not, funders require it), so a PDF isn't going
| to cut it here either.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Citation and bibliography guidelines are by far the
| things that authors neglect the most, and they are
| absolutely essential to ensure quality.
|
| Using PDF as an input format would make editing and
| typesetting practically impossible. Not that I haven't
| seen volumes where publishers did that but the results
| are abysmal and in my experience that only occurred with
| local "grey literature" like really crappy conference
| proceedings edited in an institute.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Using PDF as an input format would make editing and
| typesetting practically impossible.
|
| But they don't _do_ any editing or typesetting. They say
| "use our template" and "the author's second initial needs
| to be italic in citations". That's my whole point.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > Journals justify their fees by claiming its for
| typesetting [..]
|
| Because they _used_ to actually be doing that.
| Historically, science journals were pay-to-play because
| the journal had to typeset your document and print it.
| But with the advent of computers, they had to pivot while
| still retaining their revenue streams.
| aragilar wrote:
| Not only do you need to use LaTeX, but you need to use the
| journal's class file. Anything else will get rejected.
| thezoq2 wrote:
| That is for sure my biggest concern with typst. I wrote a tool
| that can convert from typst to latex for final submissions, but
| it is a bit sketchy and at the moment won't handle math very
| well. https://gitlab.com/theZoq2/ttt
| Paapaa wrote:
| There are already at least two publishers which accept Typst.
| So that "ever" part is already covered. But most still don't
| accept Typst and LaTeX is usually mandatory if the sources are
| required.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| which ones?
| xkevio wrote:
| IJIMAI (https://typst.app/blog/2025/typst-at-ijimai) and
| JUTI (https://forum.typst.app/t/juti-call-for-papers-best-
| paper-aw...).
|
| Admittedly, not the most renowned or most known journals
| but you have to start somewhere.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I sincerely doubt they will: most journals in pure math still
| _do not accept LuaTeX_ ; just think about that.
| Rendello wrote:
| It makes sense. LaTeX fetishists tend to be sadomasochists.
| dimatura wrote:
| Yeah, that was my first thought. And it's not just about them
| accepting typst, but also whether they would provide a template
| using typst, like they currently do for latex. Using the
| conference/journal template to write the article saves a lot of
| time for both submitters and editors (who have to deal with
| hundreds, if not thousands of submissions).
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| Typist will probably be dead or acquihired in a few years.
|
| Latex will be around for decades.
| lblume wrote:
| The Typst compiler is completely open-source. I prefer my local
| copy of the Typst compiler and CLI to whatever LaTeX provides
| right now already, and there seems to be a still growing
| community that could keep the project going even after a
| malicious acquisition of some kind.
| Syzygies wrote:
| AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary
| reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about
| semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are
| far more concise than LaTeX source.
|
| I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months
| of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the
| right touch for working with AI on topological research and code.
| It's hard to find good advice. Like surfing, the hardest part is
| all these people on the beach whining how the waves are kind of
| rough.
|
| AI can actually read SVG math diagrams better than most people.
| AI doesn't like reading LaTeX source any more than I do.
|
| I get the journal argument, but really? Some thawed-out-of-a-
| glacier journal editors still insist on two column formats, as if
| anyone still prints to paper. I'm old enough to not care. I'm
| thinking of publishing my work as a silent animation, and only
| later reluctantly releasing my AI prompts in the form of Typst
| documentation for the code.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| Printing is still not uncommon in professional scientific
| environments. When you actually have to read a paper, it turns
| out that actual paper is quite convenient.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Personally, I write for humans.
| veunes wrote:
| The idea of publishing as an animation + Typst doc actually
| sounds pretty compelling... the old PDF format is starting to
| feel pretty stale
| a5c11 wrote:
| > AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary
| reason to reconsider our choice of markup format.
|
| That's AI which must adapt, not humans. If AI can't adapt then
| it can't be considered intelligent.
|
| > Some thawed-out-of-a-glacier journal editors still insist on
| two column formats, as if anyone still prints to paper.
|
| Narrow text is easier to read because you don't have to travel
| kilometres with your eyes. I purposely shrink width of the
| browser when reading longer texts.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| - AI is the primary audience for our writing
|
| I've been wondering about this a lot lately, specifically if
| there's a way to optimise my writing for AI to return specific
| elements when it's scraped/summarised (or whatever).
| Maken wrote:
| LaTeX can compile to HTML. PDF is just one of many compilation
| targets, that happens to look nice in almost any platform.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet
| discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff
| dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6
| fingers and ossify language and framework versions.
| lblume wrote:
| I have so far not been able to get a major LLM to generate
| fully functional Typst code, no matter how much context I try
| to put into it. The models do not seem to currently understand
| Typst's concept of modes (code, markup and math) and especially
| in code mode suffers from heavy hallucination of syntax and/or
| semantics.
| patall wrote:
| Maybe if it's completely distinct. Else definitely no, unless,
| maybe, if the model is fine-tuned. Had a discussion about it
| with my dad whos work is developing in a non-mainstream
| SmallTalk dialect where it doesn't work at all.
| ykonstant wrote:
| I suppose it also depends on the specific LLM; the output of a
| free/low-cost model will likely be very different from a
| $200/month o1-pro.
| V__ wrote:
| I tried using ChatGPT for Typst a few weeks ago. I had it open
| and didn't want to search the documentation. The output was
| totally wrong it, functions which didn't exist and syntax
| errors. Your mileage may vary.
| Bayes7 wrote:
| | ,,[...] was a friend telling me his LaTeX thesis took 90
| seconds to compile towards the end"
|
| Sure, but in order to iterate you won't have to compile the whole
| document but can just keep the chapter you are working on by
| structuring it with \includes
| thomasfl wrote:
| Why not use javascript, JSX and TypScript to produce PDF? You use
| the language you know already.
| barrucadu wrote:
| Why would you want to implement an entire typesetting engine
| yourself?
| xigoi wrote:
| Since when is TypeScript a typesetting engine?
| veunes wrote:
| The ecosystem issues and rough edges in bibliography handling
| don't surprise me, but the fact that you could script so much
| directly inside the doc is really appealing
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| Is Typst's typesetting quality on par with << bare >> LaTeX ?
| with LaTeX + microtype ?
|
| It may be stupid and vain but for me if it doesn't at least match
| the former it's a no-go
| Paapaa wrote:
| Yes, it uses a very similar algorith as LaTeX. It also
| incorporates already some microtype features out of the box. So
| the typesetting quality is very good and easily comparable to
| LaTeX. Working with Typst is so much easier and faster than
| with LaTeX so you will be more productive. Many things can be
| done without resorting to external packages and scripting is a
| breeze compared to LaTeX.
|
| Just try it out. It is free, open source and very easy to
| setup. Just install the extension Tinymist on VSCode, that is
| all you need.
| thezoq2 wrote:
| Until 0.13 it wasn't quite as good as latex in my experience,
| it mainly inserted more hyphens than LaTeX.
|
| As of this version, it would be very hard to tell a difference
| in my experience
| msravi wrote:
| I have only two peeves with typst.
|
| 1. They should have carried forward the latex standard as-is for
| math, instead of getting rid of the backslash escape sequence,
| etc.
|
| 2. There is no way to share a variable across a file's scope - so
| can't have a setting that is shared across files - not even with
| state variables.
|
| Other than this, typst is solid, and with the neovim editor and
| tinymist lsp, is great to write with.
| cbolton wrote:
| Regarding point 1: I'm so glad they didn't keep the math
| syntax, there's finally progress in math text input! E.g. we
| can now write $ ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1,
| ... } \ QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ } $ $
| a = cases( 0 & quad x <= 0, mat(1, 2; 3, 4)
| vec(x, y) & quad x > 0 ) $
|
| instead of \begin{align*} \mathbb{Z} &=
| \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\ \mathbb{Q} &= \left\{
| \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\} \end{align*}
| \[ a = \begin{cases} 0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\
| \begin{pmatrix}1 & 2\\ 3 & 4\end{pmatrix}
| \begin{pmatrix}5\\6\end{pmatrix} & \quad x > 0
| \end{cases} \]
|
| Regarding point 2: you can put your settings in a file
| `settings.typ` and import it from multiple files.
| aragilar wrote:
| You could use unicode-maths?
| davemp wrote:
| Agreed. I've done a far bit of math in both and typst's
| choices are way more memorable and ergonomic.
|
| It's not like keeping the syntax would really gain typst
| anything besides folks not having learn new things.
| msravi wrote:
| > Regarding point 2: you can put your settings in a file
| `settings.typ` and import it from multiple files.
|
| Let's say I have 3 flavors of settings and 10 different typ
| files - normally I'd just have 3 flavors of top.typ
| (top1.typ, top2.typ, top3.typ) with the correct settings for
| each flavor with settings proagated to all 10 files.
| Compiling top1/top2/top3 would then create flavor1.pdf,
| flavor2.pdf, and flavor3.pdf
|
| Now how do I do it with settings1.typ, settings2.typ and
| settings3.typ? I have to go into the 10 different files and
| include the appropriate settings file! Or employ hacks like
| creating a common settings.typ using bash in the Makefile and
| including the common settings.typ in the 10 different files.
|
| Edit: This is an actual use case - I'm helping with a resume,
| and have 3 different resume styles - a resume, a cv, and a
| timeline - and different files like education, work
| experience, honors, awards, publications, projects, etc and
| the level of detail, style, and what is included or not in
| each is controlled by which resume style is active. In latex
| I did this using \newcommand and the ifthenelse package.
|
| In typst, I have had to resort to passing these global
| settings as arguments to functions spread across these
| different files, so each resume item (function) instantiated
| from the top file has a bunch of parameters like detail_level
| = 1, audited_courses = true, prefix_year = false,
| event_byline = true, include_url = true, etc., which make the
| functions unweildy.
| cbolton wrote:
| Just have a master settings.typ that you import in
| top1.typ, top2.typ and top3.typ?
|
| Alternatively, you can pass global settings at build time
| with `typst c --input name=value`
|
| Maybe I misunderstood though, if you can link to an actual
| example (gist or something) I'd be happy to try and give a
| concrete solution.
| msravi wrote:
| > Just have a master settings.typ that you import in
| top1.typ, top2.typ and top3.typ?
|
| Yes, but each included file (like education.typ,
| publications.typ, etc) should also get these settings
| propagated from top - which typst doesn't allow - the
| appropriate settings need to be included in each of these
| files.
|
| > you can pass global settings at build time with `typst
| c --input name=value`
|
| This is something I did not know - will check.
| cbolton wrote:
| You can import settings.typ in top.typ, and then import
| top.typ in education.typ. This way the variable/function
| definitions will propagate.
|
| Or you can import settings.typ in all files that need it
| (education.typ, etc.).
|
| What doesn't work is to have a file like top.typ contain
| import "settings.typ": * import "education.typ": *
|
| and hope that this will make settings available in
| education.typ. Because each .typ file is "pure" in the
| sense that it only knows the variables/functions that are
| defined in the file, or imported. This way you don't have
| a file magically affecting the bindings available in
| another file, which is nice.
|
| It's true there are cases where you'd like something like
| the above. Currently you can do something like that using
| states and context (basically putting the "settings" into
| the document and retrieving that) but it's not so nice.
| In the future the plan is to make this nicer by allowing
| custom type definitions (and having show rules and set
| rules work with them as they work with built-in types).
| wosined wrote:
| Why not LyX or TeXmacs? Both seem to be better options than yet
| another markup language.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| In addition to making it possible to write easily, TeXmacs is
| also based on a markup language. It demonstrates that a markup
| language and WYSIWYG writing can coexist efficiently.
| retorquere wrote:
| > But in the Bibtex file it is very common for the titles to
| appear in their original title case form
|
| That is common because they are following the rules about how to
| steer capitalisation when using bib(la)tex:
|
| - If the entry is in English, and the style demands title case,
| output as is
|
| - If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence
| case, convert to sentence-case and output
|
| - If the entry is not in English, output as is
| thoroughburro wrote:
| > If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence
| case, convert to sentence-case and output
|
| Nope: not possible to automatically determine which capitalised
| nouns are proper (and thus remain capitalised in sentence case)
| and which are common (and thus become uncapitalised).
|
| This is in fact why it is better to store sentence case: it can
| be unambiguously converted to title case while the reverse is
| ambiguous. It's not mere preference.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| Does Mendeley perform any better here than it does with overleaf?
| sydon wrote:
| Congrats OP on your PhD!
| poulpy123 wrote:
| I tried typst a year ago, and I found it really nice to use
| compared to Latex. I even managed to make (or modify I don't
| remember) a small module to customize boxes, something I would
| not have even though of trying with latex.
|
| I don't use latex anymore and I don't have a use case for typst,
| so I'm not currently using it, but I follow the advancements from
| time to time, and I have to disagree with the advisor.
|
| Typst is perfectly fine for replacing latex in almost any place
| that doesn't require the latex source. The other case is because
| tthe ecosystem is much smaller so if you need a specific
| extension that does not exist or is not trivial to implement
| you'll be out of luck, and you'll be stuck with latex.
| codeape wrote:
| From https://www.latex-project.org/about/:
|
| "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors
| not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but
| to concentrate on getting the right content."
|
| IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to
| trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document
| authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you
| use an outdated piece of typesetting software that is a) hard to
| configure, b) hard to use and c) produces output for the least
| useful reading platform available (paged pdfs).
|
| And the pronounciation is stupid.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Do you feel the same about Markdown?
|
| Just curious.
| codeape wrote:
| No, I like Markdown.
| lolinder wrote:
| Alternatively, they're people who write documents in a field
| where LaTeX is the standard, they're not computer savvy enough
| to try to even look for something new that might be acceptable
| or might compile to LaTeX, and at any rate they want to focus
| more on their research than they do on changing the typesetting
| norms in their field.
|
| (No shade on people who _do_ decide to use alternatives, and
| Typst is great!)
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| > IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are
| willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a
| sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling
| [...]
|
| I hope you are aware that literally all research in mathematics
| and computer science is typed up and published in LaTeX?
| codeape wrote:
| Imagine the rapid advancements we could make in those fields
| if researchers stop wasting time on a baroque, outdated
| typesetting system.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The major selling point to me, is that I can write the content
| I want, in a rather straightforward manner, and then just apply
| whatever formatting is necessary. It makes a lot of sense in
| the context of, say, university, where you're taking multiple
| classes, which each use different formatting guidelines, but
| those formatting guidelines stay the same for the duration of
| the course. I could just figure out (either using existing
| formats, or by hand-rolling my own) a document type for each
| class, and then never think about formatting again, whereas
| with a word processor, you've got to keep in mind the arcane
| series of steps necessary format your document in whatever
| style you require, and then pray that any modifications you
| make don't break the formatting.
|
| The other place it's useful is heavily typeset documents,
| especially those subject to somewhat frequent modification,
| like a resume.
| codeape wrote:
| Using a word processor (MS Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice
| Writer) is nearly as bad as using LaTeX (in some cases,
| worse).
|
| Using a plain-text format like Markdown, ReStructuredText or
| AsciiDoc is likely better in almost all cases.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Plain text formats like Markdown work great if you don't
| care at all about the specifics of the final formatting.
| Tools like LaTeX are for when you care _deeply_ that the
| resulting document follows a certain format, but don 't
| want to think about that formatting while writing.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| I've never had a big complaint about LaTeX, it's easy to get into
| and the results are stunning if you use it minimally and with
| care. They only thing I've always been missing was a way to make
| it easier to have perfect register-true typesetting for books.
| This has to do with LaTeX's paragraph flow algorithm and lack of
| global optimization, or so I've been told.
|
| Can Typst provide better register-true layout? That would be
| interesting to me.
| rcpt wrote:
| It's been a decade since I wrote anything in LaTeX and I echo all
| it's pain points.
|
| But it seems like LaTeX is the kind of thing that LLMs would nail
| perfectly. I feel like using it today wouldn't be very bad.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Generally Typst looks like a significant improvment over LaTeX to
| me. The language is cleaner and easier to understand, and the
| first class scripting support is appealing. Its embeddability and
| templating features make it an interesting option for automated
| PDF generation (e.g. invoices) as well.
|
| However its handling of introspection and convergence gives me a
| bad feeling.
| neilv wrote:
| Related work: Racket has Scribble, which is used for some books,
| academic papers, and a lot of package API docs.
|
| https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html#%...
|
| Although it doesn't look like Scheme, it has the full power of
| Scheme.
| cbondurant wrote:
| The initial motivation of LaTeX compile times being slow is very
| interesting to me.
|
| I use LaTeX as a tool for layout of books to print for hobby
| bookbinding and my current project - a 3 megabyte, 500k word
| beast of a novel - only takes around 10 seconds to compile.
|
| I cant imagine what the friend of the author here had going on in
| his paper such that his compile times took such a hit. Required
| use of specific LaTeX libraries dictated by the journals he was
| submitting to that were written inefficiently? specific LaTeX
| features or packages that end up hitting significantly slower
| codepaths?
|
| Makes me wonder if its not LaTeX itself that is the speed issue
| but instead the very maturity of the ecosystem that it has as
| advantage over Typst. It could entirely be possible that once
| Typst has the wide berth of features and functionality available
| through its ecosystem, that it would become just as easy to fall
| into compile time tarpits.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| My experience is the same as OP: Typst is significantly faster
| than Latex. My book has all of table of contents, parts and
| chapters, figures, code samples, tables, images, and
| bibliography. These are all going to require multiple passes to
| layout. E.g. you cannot insert page numbers until you have laid
| out the table of contents, as it comes before other content.
| However you cannot construct the table of contents before you
| have processed the rest of the document. A typical novel won't
| have most of these, and so I think it will be substantially
| easier to layout.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| A few parts are dramatically slower. Images for me, for
| instance, really slow down the compilation, especially if latex
| needs to read a high definition image into memory. Raw text
| like that from a novel is very fast.
| jdranczewski wrote:
| PhD theses often have many figures, and these are often not
| optimised. My thesis is around 30MB, and that's _after_ I
| optimised a couple of the most egregious figures. I 'm planning
| to make it better in the corrections phase, but file size is
| really not something most people will be concerned in the
| writing phase, and so compile times are likely to suffer.
|
| For further reference, a single-pass compilation of my thesis
| currently takes 25 seconds, and multiple passes are of course
| needed if the layout/bibliography changes. I ended up setting
| up TeXstudio to always compile only once for the preview, and
| then run the full N complications for the final build. That
| plus liberal use of \includeonly made compile times not that
| much of an issue
| mollerhoj wrote:
| it is not strange that these systems don't do incremental
| compiles? Things are literally paged.. Why does newer systems
| such as typst do full compiles when a single page is edited? I
| know that all subsequent pages might be affected, but surely,
| one could workaround this by allowing sloppy but fast compile
| options for subsequent pages, that sacrifices correct layout
| for something decent?
| flokl wrote:
| Well Typst does incremental compilation with the "watch"
| command which allows, for most documents, live preview.
| lizimo wrote:
| We [1] have been using Typst to generate PDF documents in
| production for a few months, such as invoices and labels. It's
| generating thousands of documents daily, and I'm glad that some
| of them are printed and used by people in the warehouse who are
| doing real work.
|
| I really like the simple syntax that Typst provides. It would be
| much harder for the PMs to edit the templates if we went with
| other solutions, such as wkhtmltopdf.
|
| We also looked into other document generation services that
| provide a WYSIWYG interface, and they are all quite expensive and
| often lack advanced scripting capabilities.
|
| [1] https://garnercorp.com/
| lol768 wrote:
| How have you found the generation performance? It _seems_ like
| this should really be a perfect fit for this sort of use-case,
| and I 'd hope the memory footprint and speed are all much more
| competitive than HTML-based approaches.
|
| The team I'm currently working with are using Gotenberg for
| things which we can afford to take a little while, and C#/Skia
| for things which need to be reasonably quick.
| ManBeardPc wrote:
| I only experienced a couple milliseconds for small documents
| of 15 pages or so. It's reasonably fast to show the user the
| result ,,immediately" on changes. Haven't checked memory
| usage.
| lizimo wrote:
| Most of the documents are generated in an instant, plus we
| deployed this on Kubernetes with HPA, so high load isn't an
| issue.
|
| The main issue I found with an HTML-based approach is that
| browsers are not designed for papers. It would be very
| challenging, but still possible [1], to customize the page
| layout, headers, and footers. Nonetheless, we have even more
| advanced use cases that only Typst/LaTex could cater to, such
| as displaying the table header of a table that spans multiple
| pages on every page.
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_media_q...
| film42 wrote:
| Thanks for your comment! I have a few PDFs that I need to
| generate for groups of users every so often and since
| wkhtmltopdf is considered EOL, I've been forced to use chrome
| (which sucks to manage). I just rewrote that code to use Typst
| (via the typst gem) and it's so so so much better.
| stefanos82 wrote:
| I keep an eye on https://github.com/let-def/texpresso which is a
| live rendering and error reporting for LaTeX; just watch the
| videos that are in README and you will get amazed!
| lol768 wrote:
| This is very cool; I wish it was supported by the TeXiFy-IDEA
| plugin.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| I am working with typst for my next book. This framework has been
| a dream. I am SO happy I never have to touch LateX again.
| skywal_l wrote:
| What will it be about? (please say Quake Black Book)
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I just want a a very simple Markdown like syntax to make a very
| basic resume with just few features that are not in Md:
|
| - custom spacing - horizontal/vertical (after list dots/numbers
| etc as well)
|
| - justifying the text
|
| - custom margins
|
| And for that something like this is an overkill. Less than Tex
| but still an overkill.
|
| Hell, I can do with a flavoured markdown if it supports this.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| i don't know if this is more than you're willing to do, but i
| think a lot of markdown processors allow you to specify custom
| CSS (which would allow you to do what you're looking for, if
| rendering to HTML). it's a pain compared to standard markdown
| but if you can figure out the underlying HTML tags you're
| trying to style, it should be a one-and-done change.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I shall definitely explore that.
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