10 ms·

Typst – Compose Papers Faster

376 points by iNic 3y ago

iNic 3y ago
I like the "Why should I use Typst instead of ..." section on the webpage. Tells me immediately what I want to know. More websites should have this.
- kitchi 3y ago
  Conspicuously missing a comparison to Overleaf, arguably the most similar in nature to what this is trying to achieve. Cool project, nevertheless.
  - sestep 3y ago
    Could you clarify what you mean? They explicitly compare against LaTeX, on which Overleaf is built, and I don't see any points in their comparison which are mitigated by specifically using Overleaf.
    - kitchi 3y ago
      Overleaf solves a lot of the same problems as Typst, although since it's still within the LateX ecosystem. For example changes are immediately visible (or immediately after a recompile, but practically I almost never notice) and Overleaf tries it's best to parse and simplify the dense error messages. So some of their points against LateX have been partially/entirely solved. Typst looks cool, and I'm probably going to check it out at some point, but a comparison to similar web-based LateX solutions would be more useful than what they have at the moment is all I'm saying.
      - sestep 3y ago
        Right, my understanding was that by "immediately" they meant "way faster than LaTeX". You make a good point about consolidated errors though, I hadn't thought about that before.
      - TT-392 3y ago
        That is not what typst is though, it really is just a language and a compiler which you can just run in your commandline (and a fast one at that). There is that flashy web interface, but that is separate from typst itself, but you don't need to use that, it really is a latex replacement.
        rubyfan 3y ago
        right, Typst is bigger than the online editor. The language and compiler would replace latex. It seems Overleaf is an online editor?
        okanat 3y ago
        Yup. Because installing (or doing anything with) Latex sucks. Packaging sucks, settings things sucks, every package inventing its own syntax sucks. Overleaf solves some of those problems. It still doesn't help you a lot with nonsense error messages but at least you can see them in roughly correct places half the time.
        a2800276 3y ago
        You forgot to mention that error messages suck and that the standard workflow of invoking latex twice, then placing chicken feathers one the picture your first love, running bibtex, and finally running latex three more times ( or four if it's a full moon ) also sucks.
        xvilka 3y ago
        There are projects like Tectonic [1] that aim to fix that. [1] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
      - calvinmorrison 3y ago
        the biggest being I can copy in LateX file and get all the benefits of overleaf! I Love overleaf
      - kaba0 3y ago
        You can’t avoid latex which is both good (huge ecosystem), and bad (it’s latex). Just recently I tried to help a friend with their CV where he wanted to raise the row-height in a pre-created CV “package”, and it was completely indecipherable, and I could only come up with an ugly hack.
        xvilka 3y ago
        Yes, LaTeX error messages are next to useless.
      - Levitating 3y ago
        > For example changes are immediately visible The compilation speed of LateX doesn't really compare to Typst. With Typst I can work with 3 other students on the same paper, and all of our keystrokes are immediately rendered.
  - zaep 3y ago
    for anybody who is wondering, the typst web app is a smoother user experience, having had to use overleaf for some smaller projects only, ive found it slightly janky, sometimes, probably owed to how slow and strange latex compilation can be. I'm sure the typist web app lacks some cool project management features that overleaf may offer, since it's a more mature platform, but with how much nicer typst is compared to latex, I think any shortcomings the web app may have are offset by that. but for sufficiently technical people collaborating via git is imo nicer than any web app.
- io23j23IHiu32 3y ago
  Yeah, and comparison with Word make absolutely no sense. In word you don't need to go through the entire document to change some style, you just use predefined formatting styles like "Heading 1", "Quote", etc. and if you change something in those predefined styles it will be automatically applied to the entire document. You can also work with others on same document at the same time.
  - SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
    You can do the same thing with Typst. There may be fewer predefined "styles", but you can just define your own quite easily. And they're far more powerful than in Word.
  - stefandesu 3y ago
    I wish that would work with non-tech people. In my experience, no matter how hard you try to teach them, they'll end up messing up the formatting in some way.
    - mbork_pl 3y ago
      This. ALmost nobody knows/uses that feature. FTR, there are also many people who use LaTeX in a similar way...
      - paledot 3y ago
        Which is a commentary on the UX of the feature, not on the users.
        mbork_pl 3y ago
        Fair enough - but how would you improve the UX?
        paledot 3y ago
        Not a UX designer, but I would try worsening the UX of B/I/U/size operations to make users more inclined to reach for the formatting style picker instead. I would also heavily optimize the process to edit styles, so changing the font size of a heading changes all headings of that level unless you specify otherwise. (In fact, as I talk through this, I think the solution may just be to abandon the idea that attributes like bold and size are applied directly to text, and instead associate them exclusively with styles. Basically the migration from <b> to <strong> at the dawn of CSS, in WYSIWYG form.) Ultimately you'd end up with a word processor that's harder to use but easier to use right. And no sales team will greenlight that. But this entire discussion is predicated on a very prescriptivist viewpoint of the "right" way to use a word processor.
- countrymile 3y ago
  Where is the comparison with markdown? Coming from a quarto/Rstudio background here
  - josephg 3y ago
    Markdown on its own isn’t in the same league as latex and similar systems. Off the top of my head, markdown doesn’t support: Figures outside the flow of the document, references, layouts (columns, etc), comments, formulas, a standard and good looking pdf output, page breaks, custom layouts for authors / abstract / etc, numbered chapters, autogenerated table of contents, custom blocks with different formatting, footnotes, appendixes and a whole lot more. There are various “batteries included” markdown renderers - maybe like quarto - which add mermaid for diagrams and a few other features. But I’ve never seen a paper written in markdown with the same polish as what latex produces. It just doesn’t have the depth of features that you need for making a professional looking paper. Latex ships with all of that out of the box. If their target market is people writing scientific papers, it makes sense that markdown isn’t in the list. Markdown isn’t a serious competitor.
  - jansan 3y ago
    This is not the same league, maybe not even the same sport. Markdown is for convenient and quick "good enough" looking text editing. It is very good at what it is supposed to do, but the limitations are quite obvious. Typst has its focus on editing scientific documents, something that Markdown was just not made for.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
      I agree they are playing different sports! Ideally, unrendered markdown still provides a first-class reading experience. I don't think Typst has that as a design goal.
      - kaba0 3y ago
- taink 3y ago
  This was cool, but the best thing was the dedicated transition guide from LaTeX to Typst[1]. The bottom section especially, which is a list of Typst's shortcomings compared to LaTeX. This helped a lot when actually choosing this over Overleaf for the last writing project I had. [1] https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/
- boomlinde 3y ago
  I liked "sign up for free and try it now" for the same reason.
- bradknowles 3y ago
  Where is this section? As soon as I read your comment, I wanted to go read this section and see if they mentioned tools like Google docs or Quip. Yet, I wasn't able to find any such section.
JohnKemeny 3y ago
1. Why not use Markdown-compatible syntax? 2. Why would we want to observe changes in real time? Do you want this when coding too? My workflow (that I share with co-authors) is to write everything in Markdown (using Pandoc to get PDF output). When we are almost finished, we export (again with Pandoc) to LaTeX. We collaborate on Git, because, just as when programming, I don't want my co-authors to witness my crappy thought process. That's just noise. Git allows us to use different Git-branches for the arxiv version, the conference version, and the journal version. We also use tags to indicate different submissions.
- huijzer 3y ago
  1. Why not use Markdown-compatible syntax? I‘m not an Typst author, but I don’t get your point. How are you going to specify a 2 column outlay, for example? Markdown is not very expressive. You can always compile (less expressive) Markdown to Typst. 2. Why would we want to observe changes in real time? Do you want this when coding too? You prefer to debug by looking at the code only?
  - JohnKemeny 3y ago
    1. Using `classoption: twocolumn` 2. I see that I wasn't completely clear. I meant: why do we want to see our collaborators' changes in real time? To me, that would be very disturbing.
    - eichin 3y ago
      Yeah, collaborating in real time on the same document is pretty neat (from using google docs for this.) Having someone else typing on the same page got an unexpectedly visceral "argh! it's moving! get it off of me" reaction the first couple of times I tried it, had to switch tabs and come back later. It's definitely only a problem for some people, and might even be specific to some aspect of the google docs implementation, I don't know yet. But yeah, that feature is not the slam dunk it sounds like, and you might not realize it until you're in the middle of it.
behnamoh 3y ago
I'm afraid the ship has sailed and people will use latex for ever (I personally use Word but with lots of customizations). why use latex (and this is coming from someone who prefers Word to latex): - much better tooling than any other format - much more discussion on various problems you'll hit. - much more training data for chatgpt and other LLMs, so your personal assistant can help you with latex syntax. good luck getting that level of support for typst or any other new programming language. - network effect -- if your professor only knows latex, you can't use typst. and professors are slow/reluctant to adopt new shiny tech. if it has worked in the past 50 years, why change it?
- awestroke 3y ago
  Yeah, the LaTeX ship has sailed, I'll never touch it again. I'm very happy that I can use Typst instead.
- JohnKemeny 3y ago
  You can get really far today with Pandoc Markdown, which has many benefits over LaTeX. So, just wait until a generation has grown up with Markdown as a universal text language. Indeed, with the exception of the journal's template, you can write a full paper in Pandoc Markdown and nobody would spot the difference.
  - throw_pm23 3y ago
    Can you link a scientific article or book pdf that was written in Markdown?
    - esafak 3y ago
      https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/#books https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/#books
    - __mharrison__ 3y ago
      The PDFs of my recent books, Effective XGBoost, and Learning Python for Data were created using markdown and Pandoc (somewhere along the way). I'm in the middle of doing the second edition of Effective Pandas, moving it from rst based tooling to markdown/Pandoc.
huijzer 3y ago
I‘ve been using Typst in production to generate a PDF on the fly and it has been amazing. Much smaller dependencies than LaTeX and it was also extremely fast. The syntax takes a bit of getting used to but compared to LaTeX I can’t complain. It looks like a powerful syntax.
- JohnKemeny 3y ago
  I would recommend testing Markdown and Pandoc. It's open source, and it can export to pdf (via latex), html, latex, doc(x), odt, rst, wiki, ...
  - huijzer 3y ago
    I needed a pretty PDF with headers and footers. Markdown was not expressive enough.
    - tonyarkles 3y ago
      As of late I’ve been using restructuredtext and rst2latex.py and have been quite happy with it. I’m quite used to LaTeX for writing equations and RST handles most of the other boilerplate. If you do need to do fancy TeX things you can still just drop that inline and it generally works pretty good.
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        RestructuredText is pretty awful in my experience. Barely documented and unreliable. Asciidoc is much much much better.
        tonyarkles 3y ago
        Interesting! I picked it up because of Sphinx primarily. The ability to extend it to pretty easily and cleanly add things like project management blocks is awesome. The Emacs ReST mode generally works pretty good. The only thing that kind of tripped me up was the indentation rules around bullet points. Just had a quick look at AsciiDoc and it does have some features that look really nice (e.g. the include:: blocks are quite reminiscent of how I structured my LaTeX MSc thesis). And it looks like it similarly has an extension API that would likely fit some of the project management stuff I put together. Neat!
rochak 3y ago
Time to rewrite my resume using this. If anyone knows any similar tools, please share them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- legobmw99 3y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224
- jskherman 3y ago
  Check out the awesome-typst [0] list as well for ideas. [0]: https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst
- nakedneuron 3y ago
  Should use Typst, it's really the best out there at the moment.
renewiltord 3y ago
This is very cool. What's the pricing you anticipate?
- TT-392 3y ago
  The compiler is open source, and written in rust. The web interface is free, and I think it will stay that way? (I think they run on donations). They could really use some clearer marketing on the front page...
  - LegibleCrimson 3y ago
    > The compiler is open source, and written in rust. Wow, that's really appealing to me; thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking "well, this looks nicer than LaTeX, and I'm really frustrated with LaTeX, but I really don't want to jump right into a big WYSIWYG thing". Now I'm really interested. Most of the other "replacements" suffer in some big ways (Markdown and RST/Sphinx are great for structured content, but not great for meticulous control over the presentation). $ cargo install --git https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst ... $ printf 'Total displaced soil by glacial flow:\n\n$ 7.32 beta +\n sum_(i=0)^nabla Q_i / 2 $\n' > file.typ $ typst compile file.typ output.pdf And I've got a cool rendered PDF with a math formula! I'm very keen now to see exactly how flexible, robust, and extensible this is. LaTeX can do basically anything, but you pay for the power in blood. I would love a typesetting system that isn't horribly painful to extend.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      I think they were very careful to have the same expressivity as latex. It’s basically a whole language with a human-friendly syntax. Their discord channel has a bunch of community plugins if you want a showcase. It’s not yet as big as latex, obviously, but I think it already has the critical mass to make it a sound choice.
- pasabagi 3y ago
  The idea is to have an opensource compiler (to avoid lock in) and a paid IDE-style tool.
ThePhysicist 3y ago
This was built initially by two PhD students in Germany if I remember correctly, they then spun it off into a company. Super impressive given how difficult typesetting is. And it's written in Rust as well!
- drsir 3y ago
  I believe they were masters students not PhD students.
  - siddbudd 3y ago
    Yep, Martin Haug wrote his Master's thesis [1] about it. [1] https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/mhaug/fast-typesetting-incremental-compilation.pdf https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/mhaug/fast-typesetting-increme...
    - nakedneuron 3y ago
      Laurenz Mädje (the other founder) did too: https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/laurmaedje/programmable-markup-language-for-typesetting.pdf https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/laurmaedje/programmable-markup...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Racing0461 3y ago
Looks nice for resumes also.
- iamdbtoo 3y ago
  I did my last resume in Typst and it was so much better than a Word/Google doc or Latex.
mfld 3y ago
Typst could be to LaTeX what Python was to Perl.
- jansan 3y ago
  Or what Word was to WordPerfect.
  - gilcot 3y ago
    You mean worst but successful 'cause of harsh marketing?
arjvik 3y ago
I love everything about Typst except for the math-mode syntax. I'm too used to LaTeX syntax for math (my editor of choice uses MathJAX to render math and math only). Any chance of substituting in the math syntax (even if it's the new rendering engine?)
poulpy123 3y ago
I tested it two months ago and I was really impressed: clear, fast and good rendering. I even managed to modify a module for message boxes in 15mn. I haven't used latex in 10 years, but I would have replaced it with typst everywhere I could. I still hope it could also replace markdown
teleforce 3y ago
This is one the most recent posts on Typst with 159 comments [1]. Why it is not appear on HN past when checked just baffled me, perhaps Dang or someone as can explain. I think the closest system to typst is Overleaf (I hope they put in their website comparison menu), but the killer feature is that Typst apparently can support local-first that Overleaf does not, and it's wonderful feature for those who are writing a lot even when camping in remote areas (ok I'm stretching a bit there). Since the Typst's document compiler is open source then it feasible to integrate it with Docusaurus and Tinasaurus (based on TinaCMS). But again there is also Pretext that is open source that can be used as document compiler alternative to Typst [2]. [1]Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 [2] PreTeXt: Write Once, Read Anywhere: https://pretextbook.org/index.html https://pretextbook.org/index.html [3] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publishing System: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231025
- matricaria 3y ago
  The local-first version of Overleaf is just LaTeX, or am I missing something?
  - cl3misch 3y ago
    Maybe OP means the collaboration feature. I don't know whether local typst supports that though. Expecting online collaboration in "local first" may be an oxymoron in itself...
    - matricaria 3y ago
      As far as I know, local Typst does not support collaboration. At least not in the way the online version and Overleaf do.
    - mgunyho 3y ago
      The pro version of Overleaf supports offline work with a simple trick: every Overleaf document can be accessed as a git repo. It's a bit limited (there's no branches or tags, and it breaks the "track changes" feature) and trying to convince the average researcher to learn git is a challenge, but if you know git it works quite well.
amarko 3y ago
LaTeX was great for its time but it should have died long ago. Typst is such a pleasure to use in comparison. It's unfortunately not quite capable enough yet to use for my papers, but I very much hope that it finds success in the future.
- nakedneuron 3y ago
  It's still fresh (like a warm apple pie). Though, I'm astounded how much depth is already in there.
jchook 3y ago
Am I the only person that wrote my thesis in Maple?
xvilka 3y ago
Is there something like TikZ for Typst?
- c-st 3y ago
  As per https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst#graphics https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst#graphics there is CeTZ. Of course it is not as full-fledged as TikZ, but it works pretty well.
eviks 3y ago
> Say goodbye to fidgety formula editors and antiquated syntax. > lim_(x->oo) 1/x = 0 how is -> and 00 modern when → and ∞ exist?
- jonathanstrange 3y ago
  Nobody knows where to find these glyphs on the keyboard.
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    True, I have shortcuts for it instead
  - anserin 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
- laurmaedje 3y ago
  Those are supported, too.
tugberkk 3y ago
This is very good. Unfortunately, (majority of) journals and conferences will probably never use it. At least good for our own papers though.
runiq 3y ago
As I've just written on Lemmy, Typst is so good that I've donated a couple of times. The one dealbreaker for me, though, is the current lack of locale-aware decimal separators: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093 There's a workaround, though.
maweki 3y ago
The problem with having such a technology not being based on latex: every conference in my field (computer science) with formal proceedings needs you to send your latex sources to compile the proceedings. I think this is fine for workshop submissions without formal proceedings, or a thesis, white paper, etc.. But as soon as formal proceedings are part of the process, you need to fit in with that process.
- jojva 3y ago
  Thesevm processes don't need to be immutable, they could evolve to accept both eventually. LaTeX has had its time, it's good to see competition even though it may not be as mature yet.
  - BlindEyeHalo 3y ago
    Good luck trying to convince a large group of maths professors to change the way they are doing things.
    - zuhsetaqi 3y ago
      These math professors are going to be replaced by younger math professors eventually which may know and like Typst more than LaTeX.
keyle 3y ago
This is impressive, and in Rust and open source Apache license! Nice! I couldn't find Tauri in there, any idea what they used for the "frontend"? (I don't know the Rust eco-system that well and there are a ton of packages).
vitorsr 3y ago
> Say goodbye to fidgety formula editors and antiquated syntax. They should not have deviated from the American Mathematical Society notation [1]. Compare the list of supported commands on MathJax [2] or KaTeX [3] and Typst [4]. The main purpose of LaTeX today is to be the de facto standard for scientific and technical mathematical writing. The issue with these projects is the presumptuous simultaneous breakage of the standard with a poor handpicked mangled subset thereof. [1] https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/amsmath https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/amsmath [2] https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/macros/index.html https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/macros/index.ht... [3] https://katex.org/docs/supported.html https://katex.org/docs/supported.html [4] https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/
- kaba0 3y ago
  Typst is a programmable language, where math mode is just syntactic sugar. It can be extended as necessary.
- flexagoon 3y ago
  KaTeX and MathJax documentations mostly list mathematical symbols instead of actual typesetting commands. Typst supports symbols as well, they just aren't considered to be "math commands", so obviously they aren't on the "math commands" page of the documentation. https://typst.app/docs/reference/symbols/sym/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/symbols/sym/ (And, of course, you can easily define a command for any other Unicode symbol) Certain formatting stuff like hats above letters etc. is also supported, but for those things that aren't, it's really easy to define them due to Typst being a complete programming language.
nakedneuron 3y ago
I'm a big fan. Will never touch Latex again, so much inconsisteny, so much pain. Let alone doing (and memorizing) simple things like page setup and setting the font size to the point. In Typst it's just simple and efficient, and I even don't need to explain anything of the following code (except maybe "leading" which is spacing between lines, "tracking" is space between characters, "spacing" is space bewteen words): #set page( paper: "a4", margin: (x: 2.0cm, y: 2.5cm) ) #set text( font: "Noto Sans", size: 4em, weight: "regular", fill: black, tracking: 0.2pt, spacing: 115% ) #set par( justify: false, leading: 1.75em, ) See all options... https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/page/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/page/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/par/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/par/ The documentation is very thorough and kind of.. flawless. The two theses of the founders (linked in thread, search tu-berlin.de) are an interesting read and show how they resolved the complexity of typography into simplicity and efficiency. Using plugins is easy (you can write you own too), just add a line (e.g. #import "@preview/codetastic:0.2.2"), it will download the plugin when compiling (you can also clone the git repo and reference it locally). Try to compile to pdf: #import "@preview/codetastic:0.2.2" #box(codetastic.qrcode("https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422")) typst compile filename.typ The plugins repository (https://typst.app/docs/packages/ https://typst.app/docs/packages/) is filling rapidly and has already some cool ones like codelst (show codeblocks, highlight lines and reference them), codetastic (generate ean + qr-codes) and showybox (beautiful boxes whose style can be stremalined across a whole document easily). And they only started going public early this year... Not to say that the language itself isn't super powerful but you can literally program qr-code-generation in typst (which is what the plugin author did). Beautiful... #box(fill: gradient.linear(..color.map.rainbow))[Typst rocks.] Matthew Butterick who created Pollen approves too: https://forums.matthewbutterick.com/t/typst-another-typesetting-markup-language/104 https://forums.matthewbutterick.com/t/typst-another-typesett...
amai 3y ago
Can typst also compile to HTML like markdown?
gilcot 3y ago
Instead of comparing to LaTeX format, it should compare to ConTeXt…

376 points by iNic 3y ago

iNic 3y ago

I like the "Why should I use Typst instead of ..." section on the webpage. Tells me immediately what I want to know. More websites should have this.

kitchi 3y ago
Conspicuously missing a comparison to Overleaf, arguably the most similar in nature to what this is trying to achieve. Cool project, nevertheless.
- sestep 3y ago
  Could you clarify what you mean? They explicitly compare against LaTeX, on which Overleaf is built, and I don't see any points in their comparison which are mitigated by specifically using Overleaf.
  - kitchi 3y ago
    Overleaf solves a lot of the same problems as Typst, although since it's still within the LateX ecosystem. For example changes are immediately visible (or immediately after a recompile, but practically I almost never notice) and Overleaf tries it's best to parse and simplify the dense error messages. So some of their points against LateX have been partially/entirely solved. Typst looks cool, and I'm probably going to check it out at some point, but a comparison to similar web-based LateX solutions would be more useful than what they have at the moment is all I'm saying.
    - sestep 3y ago
      Right, my understanding was that by "immediately" they meant "way faster than LaTeX". You make a good point about consolidated errors though, I hadn't thought about that before.
    - TT-392 3y ago
      That is not what typst is though, it really is just a language and a compiler which you can just run in your commandline (and a fast one at that). There is that flashy web interface, but that is separate from typst itself, but you don't need to use that, it really is a latex replacement.
      - rubyfan 3y ago
        right, Typst is bigger than the online editor. The language and compiler would replace latex. It seems Overleaf is an online editor?
        okanat 3y ago
        Yup. Because installing (or doing anything with) Latex sucks. Packaging sucks, settings things sucks, every package inventing its own syntax sucks. Overleaf solves some of those problems. It still doesn't help you a lot with nonsense error messages but at least you can see them in roughly correct places half the time.
        a2800276 3y ago
        You forgot to mention that error messages suck and that the standard workflow of invoking latex twice, then placing chicken feathers one the picture your first love, running bibtex, and finally running latex three more times ( or four if it's a full moon ) also sucks.
        xvilka 3y ago
        There are projects like Tectonic [1] that aim to fix that. [1] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      the biggest being I can copy in LateX file and get all the benefits of overleaf! I Love overleaf
    - kaba0 3y ago
      You can’t avoid latex which is both good (huge ecosystem), and bad (it’s latex). Just recently I tried to help a friend with their CV where he wanted to raise the row-height in a pre-created CV “package”, and it was completely indecipherable, and I could only come up with an ugly hack.
      - xvilka 3y ago
        Yes, LaTeX error messages are next to useless.
    - Levitating 3y ago
      > For example changes are immediately visible The compilation speed of LateX doesn't really compare to Typst. With Typst I can work with 3 other students on the same paper, and all of our keystrokes are immediately rendered.
- zaep 3y ago
  for anybody who is wondering, the typst web app is a smoother user experience, having had to use overleaf for some smaller projects only, ive found it slightly janky, sometimes, probably owed to how slow and strange latex compilation can be. I'm sure the typist web app lacks some cool project management features that overleaf may offer, since it's a more mature platform, but with how much nicer typst is compared to latex, I think any shortcomings the web app may have are offset by that. but for sufficiently technical people collaborating via git is imo nicer than any web app.
io23j23IHiu32 3y ago
Yeah, and comparison with Word make absolutely no sense. In word you don't need to go through the entire document to change some style, you just use predefined formatting styles like "Heading 1", "Quote", etc. and if you change something in those predefined styles it will be automatically applied to the entire document. You can also work with others on same document at the same time.
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
  You can do the same thing with Typst. There may be fewer predefined "styles", but you can just define your own quite easily. And they're far more powerful than in Word.
- stefandesu 3y ago
  I wish that would work with non-tech people. In my experience, no matter how hard you try to teach them, they'll end up messing up the formatting in some way.
  - mbork_pl 3y ago
    This. ALmost nobody knows/uses that feature. FTR, there are also many people who use LaTeX in a similar way...
    - paledot 3y ago
      Which is a commentary on the UX of the feature, not on the users.
      - mbork_pl 3y ago
        Fair enough - but how would you improve the UX?
        paledot 3y ago
        Not a UX designer, but I would try worsening the UX of B/I/U/size operations to make users more inclined to reach for the formatting style picker instead. I would also heavily optimize the process to edit styles, so changing the font size of a heading changes all headings of that level unless you specify otherwise. (In fact, as I talk through this, I think the solution may just be to abandon the idea that attributes like bold and size are applied directly to text, and instead associate them exclusively with styles. Basically the migration from <b> to <strong> at the dawn of CSS, in WYSIWYG form.) Ultimately you'd end up with a word processor that's harder to use but easier to use right. And no sales team will greenlight that. But this entire discussion is predicated on a very prescriptivist viewpoint of the "right" way to use a word processor.
countrymile 3y ago
Where is the comparison with markdown? Coming from a quarto/Rstudio background here
- josephg 3y ago
  Markdown on its own isn’t in the same league as latex and similar systems. Off the top of my head, markdown doesn’t support: Figures outside the flow of the document, references, layouts (columns, etc), comments, formulas, a standard and good looking pdf output, page breaks, custom layouts for authors / abstract / etc, numbered chapters, autogenerated table of contents, custom blocks with different formatting, footnotes, appendixes and a whole lot more. There are various “batteries included” markdown renderers - maybe like quarto - which add mermaid for diagrams and a few other features. But I’ve never seen a paper written in markdown with the same polish as what latex produces. It just doesn’t have the depth of features that you need for making a professional looking paper. Latex ships with all of that out of the box. If their target market is people writing scientific papers, it makes sense that markdown isn’t in the list. Markdown isn’t a serious competitor.
- jansan 3y ago
  This is not the same league, maybe not even the same sport. Markdown is for convenient and quick "good enough" looking text editing. It is very good at what it is supposed to do, but the limitations are quite obvious. Typst has its focus on editing scientific documents, something that Markdown was just not made for.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
    I agree they are playing different sports! Ideally, unrendered markdown still provides a first-class reading experience. I don't think Typst has that as a design goal.
    - kaba0 3y ago
taink 3y ago
This was cool, but the best thing was the dedicated transition guide from LaTeX to Typst[1]. The bottom section especially, which is a list of Typst's shortcomings compared to LaTeX. This helped a lot when actually choosing this over Overleaf for the last writing project I had. [1] https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/
boomlinde 3y ago
I liked "sign up for free and try it now" for the same reason.
bradknowles 3y ago
Where is this section? As soon as I read your comment, I wanted to go read this section and see if they mentioned tools like Google docs or Quip. Yet, I wasn't able to find any such section.

JohnKemeny 3y ago

1. Why not use Markdown-compatible syntax? 2. Why would we want to observe changes in real time? Do you want this when coding too? My workflow (that I share with co-authors) is to write everything in Markdown (using Pandoc to get PDF output). When we are almost finished, we export (again with Pandoc) to LaTeX. We collaborate on Git, because, just as when programming, I don't want my co-authors to witness my crappy thought process. That's just noise. Git allows us to use different Git-branches for the arxiv version, the conference version, and the journal version. We also use tags to indicate different submissions.

huijzer 3y ago
1. Why not use Markdown-compatible syntax? I‘m not an Typst author, but I don’t get your point. How are you going to specify a 2 column outlay, for example? Markdown is not very expressive. You can always compile (less expressive) Markdown to Typst. 2. Why would we want to observe changes in real time? Do you want this when coding too? You prefer to debug by looking at the code only?
- JohnKemeny 3y ago
  1. Using `classoption: twocolumn` 2. I see that I wasn't completely clear. I meant: why do we want to see our collaborators' changes in real time? To me, that would be very disturbing.
  - eichin 3y ago
    Yeah, collaborating in real time on the same document is pretty neat (from using google docs for this.) Having someone else typing on the same page got an unexpectedly visceral "argh! it's moving! get it off of me" reaction the first couple of times I tried it, had to switch tabs and come back later. It's definitely only a problem for some people, and might even be specific to some aspect of the google docs implementation, I don't know yet. But yeah, that feature is not the slam dunk it sounds like, and you might not realize it until you're in the middle of it.

behnamoh 3y ago

I'm afraid the ship has sailed and people will use latex for ever (I personally use Word but with lots of customizations). why use latex (and this is coming from someone who prefers Word to latex): - much better tooling than any other format - much more discussion on various problems you'll hit. - much more training data for chatgpt and other LLMs, so your personal assistant can help you with latex syntax. good luck getting that level of support for typst or any other new programming language. - network effect -- if your professor only knows latex, you can't use typst. and professors are slow/reluctant to adopt new shiny tech. if it has worked in the past 50 years, why change it?

awestroke 3y ago
Yeah, the LaTeX ship has sailed, I'll never touch it again. I'm very happy that I can use Typst instead.
JohnKemeny 3y ago
You can get really far today with Pandoc Markdown, which has many benefits over LaTeX. So, just wait until a generation has grown up with Markdown as a universal text language. Indeed, with the exception of the journal's template, you can write a full paper in Pandoc Markdown and nobody would spot the difference.
- throw_pm23 3y ago
  Can you link a scientific article or book pdf that was written in Markdown?
  - esafak 3y ago
    https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/#books https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/#books
  - __mharrison__ 3y ago
    The PDFs of my recent books, Effective XGBoost, and Learning Python for Data were created using markdown and Pandoc (somewhere along the way). I'm in the middle of doing the second edition of Effective Pandas, moving it from rst based tooling to markdown/Pandoc.

huijzer 3y ago

I‘ve been using Typst in production to generate a PDF on the fly and it has been amazing. Much smaller dependencies than LaTeX and it was also extremely fast. The syntax takes a bit of getting used to but compared to LaTeX I can’t complain. It looks like a powerful syntax.

JohnKemeny 3y ago
I would recommend testing Markdown and Pandoc. It's open source, and it can export to pdf (via latex), html, latex, doc(x), odt, rst, wiki, ...
- huijzer 3y ago
  I needed a pretty PDF with headers and footers. Markdown was not expressive enough.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    As of late I’ve been using restructuredtext and rst2latex.py and have been quite happy with it. I’m quite used to LaTeX for writing equations and RST handles most of the other boilerplate. If you do need to do fancy TeX things you can still just drop that inline and it generally works pretty good.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      RestructuredText is pretty awful in my experience. Barely documented and unreliable. Asciidoc is much much much better.
      - tonyarkles 3y ago
        Interesting! I picked it up because of Sphinx primarily. The ability to extend it to pretty easily and cleanly add things like project management blocks is awesome. The Emacs ReST mode generally works pretty good. The only thing that kind of tripped me up was the indentation rules around bullet points. Just had a quick look at AsciiDoc and it does have some features that look really nice (e.g. the include:: blocks are quite reminiscent of how I structured my LaTeX MSc thesis). And it looks like it similarly has an extension API that would likely fit some of the project management stuff I put together. Neat!

rochak 3y ago

Time to rewrite my resume using this. If anyone knows any similar tools, please share them.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
legobmw99 3y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224
jskherman 3y ago
Check out the awesome-typst [0] list as well for ideas. [0]: https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst
nakedneuron 3y ago
Should use Typst, it's really the best out there at the moment.

renewiltord 3y ago

This is very cool. What's the pricing you anticipate?

TT-392 3y ago
The compiler is open source, and written in rust. The web interface is free, and I think it will stay that way? (I think they run on donations). They could really use some clearer marketing on the front page...
- LegibleCrimson 3y ago
  > The compiler is open source, and written in rust. Wow, that's really appealing to me; thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking "well, this looks nicer than LaTeX, and I'm really frustrated with LaTeX, but I really don't want to jump right into a big WYSIWYG thing". Now I'm really interested. Most of the other "replacements" suffer in some big ways (Markdown and RST/Sphinx are great for structured content, but not great for meticulous control over the presentation). $ cargo install --git https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst ... $ printf 'Total displaced soil by glacial flow:\n\n$ 7.32 beta +\n sum_(i=0)^nabla Q_i / 2 $\n' > file.typ $ typst compile file.typ output.pdf And I've got a cool rendered PDF with a math formula! I'm very keen now to see exactly how flexible, robust, and extensible this is. LaTeX can do basically anything, but you pay for the power in blood. I would love a typesetting system that isn't horribly painful to extend.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I think they were very careful to have the same expressivity as latex. It’s basically a whole language with a human-friendly syntax. Their discord channel has a bunch of community plugins if you want a showcase. It’s not yet as big as latex, obviously, but I think it already has the critical mass to make it a sound choice.
pasabagi 3y ago
The idea is to have an opensource compiler (to avoid lock in) and a paid IDE-style tool.

ThePhysicist 3y ago

This was built initially by two PhD students in Germany if I remember correctly, they then spun it off into a company. Super impressive given how difficult typesetting is. And it's written in Rust as well!

drsir 3y ago
I believe they were masters students not PhD students.
- siddbudd 3y ago
  Yep, Martin Haug wrote his Master's thesis [1] about it. [1] https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/mhaug/fast-typesetting-incremental-compilation.pdf https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/mhaug/fast-typesetting-increme...
  - nakedneuron 3y ago
    Laurenz Mädje (the other founder) did too: https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/laurmaedje/programmable-markup-language-for-typesetting.pdf https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/laurmaedje/programmable-markup...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Racing0461 3y ago

Looks nice for resumes also.

iamdbtoo 3y ago
I did my last resume in Typst and it was so much better than a Word/Google doc or Latex.

mfld 3y ago

Typst could be to LaTeX what Python was to Perl.

jansan 3y ago
Or what Word was to WordPerfect.
- gilcot 3y ago
  You mean worst but successful 'cause of harsh marketing?

arjvik 3y ago

I love everything about Typst except for the math-mode syntax. I'm too used to LaTeX syntax for math (my editor of choice uses MathJAX to render math and math only). Any chance of substituting in the math syntax (even if it's the new rendering engine?)

poulpy123 3y ago

I tested it two months ago and I was really impressed: clear, fast and good rendering. I even managed to modify a module for message boxes in 15mn. I haven't used latex in 10 years, but I would have replaced it with typst everywhere I could. I still hope it could also replace markdown

teleforce 3y ago

This is one the most recent posts on Typst with 159 comments [1]. Why it is not appear on HN past when checked just baffled me, perhaps Dang or someone as can explain. I think the closest system to typst is Overleaf (I hope they put in their website comparison menu), but the killer feature is that Typst apparently can support local-first that Overleaf does not, and it's wonderful feature for those who are writing a lot even when camping in remote areas (ok I'm stretching a bit there). Since the Typst's document compiler is open source then it feasible to integrate it with Docusaurus and Tinasaurus (based on TinaCMS). But again there is also Pretext that is open source that can be used as document compiler alternative to Typst [2]. [1]Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 [2] PreTeXt: Write Once, Read Anywhere: https://pretextbook.org/index.html https://pretextbook.org/index.html [3] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publishing System: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231025

matricaria 3y ago
The local-first version of Overleaf is just LaTeX, or am I missing something?
- cl3misch 3y ago
  Maybe OP means the collaboration feature. I don't know whether local typst supports that though. Expecting online collaboration in "local first" may be an oxymoron in itself...
  - matricaria 3y ago
    As far as I know, local Typst does not support collaboration. At least not in the way the online version and Overleaf do.
  - mgunyho 3y ago
    The pro version of Overleaf supports offline work with a simple trick: every Overleaf document can be accessed as a git repo. It's a bit limited (there's no branches or tags, and it breaks the "track changes" feature) and trying to convince the average researcher to learn git is a challenge, but if you know git it works quite well.

amarko 3y ago

LaTeX was great for its time but it should have died long ago. Typst is such a pleasure to use in comparison. It's unfortunately not quite capable enough yet to use for my papers, but I very much hope that it finds success in the future.

nakedneuron 3y ago
It's still fresh (like a warm apple pie). Though, I'm astounded how much depth is already in there.

jchook 3y ago

Am I the only person that wrote my thesis in Maple?

xvilka 3y ago

Is there something like TikZ for Typst?

c-st 3y ago
As per https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst#graphics https://github.com/qjcg/awesome-typst#graphics there is CeTZ. Of course it is not as full-fledged as TikZ, but it works pretty well.

eviks 3y ago

> Say goodbye to fidgety formula editors and antiquated syntax. > lim_(x->oo) 1/x = 0 how is -> and 00 modern when → and ∞ exist?

jonathanstrange 3y ago
Nobody knows where to find these glyphs on the keyboard.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  True, I have shortcuts for it instead
- anserin 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
laurmaedje 3y ago
Those are supported, too.

tugberkk 3y ago

This is very good. Unfortunately, (majority of) journals and conferences will probably never use it. At least good for our own papers though.

runiq 3y ago

As I've just written on Lemmy, Typst is so good that I've donated a couple of times. The one dealbreaker for me, though, is the current lack of locale-aware decimal separators: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093 There's a workaround, though.

maweki 3y ago

The problem with having such a technology not being based on latex: every conference in my field (computer science) with formal proceedings needs you to send your latex sources to compile the proceedings. I think this is fine for workshop submissions without formal proceedings, or a thesis, white paper, etc.. But as soon as formal proceedings are part of the process, you need to fit in with that process.

jojva 3y ago
Thesevm processes don't need to be immutable, they could evolve to accept both eventually. LaTeX has had its time, it's good to see competition even though it may not be as mature yet.
- BlindEyeHalo 3y ago
  Good luck trying to convince a large group of maths professors to change the way they are doing things.
  - zuhsetaqi 3y ago
    These math professors are going to be replaced by younger math professors eventually which may know and like Typst more than LaTeX.

keyle 3y ago

This is impressive, and in Rust and open source Apache license! Nice! I couldn't find Tauri in there, any idea what they used for the "frontend"? (I don't know the Rust eco-system that well and there are a ton of packages).

vitorsr 3y ago

> Say goodbye to fidgety formula editors and antiquated syntax. They should not have deviated from the American Mathematical Society notation [1]. Compare the list of supported commands on MathJax [2] or KaTeX [3] and Typst [4]. The main purpose of LaTeX today is to be the de facto standard for scientific and technical mathematical writing. The issue with these projects is the presumptuous simultaneous breakage of the standard with a poor handpicked mangled subset thereof. [1] https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/amsmath https://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/amsmath [2] https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/macros/index.html https://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/input/tex/macros/index.ht... [3] https://katex.org/docs/supported.html https://katex.org/docs/supported.html [4] https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/

kaba0 3y ago
Typst is a programmable language, where math mode is just syntactic sugar. It can be extended as necessary.
flexagoon 3y ago
KaTeX and MathJax documentations mostly list mathematical symbols instead of actual typesetting commands. Typst supports symbols as well, they just aren't considered to be "math commands", so obviously they aren't on the "math commands" page of the documentation. https://typst.app/docs/reference/symbols/sym/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/symbols/sym/ (And, of course, you can easily define a command for any other Unicode symbol) Certain formatting stuff like hats above letters etc. is also supported, but for those things that aren't, it's really easy to define them due to Typst being a complete programming language.

nakedneuron 3y ago

I'm a big fan. Will never touch Latex again, so much inconsisteny, so much pain. Let alone doing (and memorizing) simple things like page setup and setting the font size to the point. In Typst it's just simple and efficient, and I even don't need to explain anything of the following code (except maybe "leading" which is spacing between lines, "tracking" is space between characters, "spacing" is space bewteen words): #set page( paper: "a4", margin: (x: 2.0cm, y: 2.5cm) ) #set text( font: "Noto Sans", size: 4em, weight: "regular", fill: black, tracking: 0.2pt, spacing: 115% ) #set par( justify: false, leading: 1.75em, ) See all options... https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/page/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/page/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/par/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/par/ The documentation is very thorough and kind of.. flawless. The two theses of the founders (linked in thread, search tu-berlin.de) are an interesting read and show how they resolved the complexity of typography into simplicity and efficiency. Using plugins is easy (you can write you own too), just add a line (e.g. #import "@preview/codetastic:0.2.2"), it will download the plugin when compiling (you can also clone the git repo and reference it locally). Try to compile to pdf: #import "@preview/codetastic:0.2.2" #box(codetastic.qrcode("https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422")) typst compile filename.typ The plugins repository (https://typst.app/docs/packages/ https://typst.app/docs/packages/) is filling rapidly and has already some cool ones like codelst (show codeblocks, highlight lines and reference them), codetastic (generate ean + qr-codes) and showybox (beautiful boxes whose style can be stremalined across a whole document easily). And they only started going public early this year... Not to say that the language itself isn't super powerful but you can literally program qr-code-generation in typst (which is what the plugin author did). Beautiful... #box(fill: gradient.linear(..color.map.rainbow))[Typst rocks.] Matthew Butterick who created Pollen approves too: https://forums.matthewbutterick.com/t/typst-another-typesetting-markup-language/104 https://forums.matthewbutterick.com/t/typst-another-typesett...

amai 3y ago

Can typst also compile to HTML like markdown?

gilcot 3y ago

Instead of comparing to LaTeX format, it should compare to ConTeXt…