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> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are awa

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. Well here's the process I went through in the last few years: I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was supposed to replace pdfTeX and thought the future of TeX was bright. Then I saw the continued efforts in LaTeX3 and thought that was weird and wasteful: code now looks even worse with all \ExplSyntaxOn ... \ExplSyntaxOff sections and the new command syntax like \exp_args:Ne. If you're going to have a mix of two languages anyway, it makes much more sense for the second language to be a a minimal but real programming language like Lua. Then the LuaTeX devs moved their efforts to LuaMetaTeX and I found myself scratching my head. Then I spent some time with typst. Now I don't care what happens in TeX land... The experience with typst is incomparably better, and the pace of development is high in both the core language and the ecosystem. Features that took a decade to be fleshed out in LaTeX are sprouting like mushrooms in typst. It's not a fair fight. The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
YWall39 3y ago
> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Very unlikely. A new PhD student may find it beneficial to write papers with someone who only uses latex. then why bother with typst? (and I really want typst to win)
- kldx 3y ago
  Typst is a single file binary. The preview packages are versioned too. If typst breaks the API in ten years, I'd still be able to download the old binary and make a PDF from scratch. I can't begin to imagine the complexity in installing multiple texlive distributions side by side.
  - crotchfire 3y ago
    That old binary won't link with the shared libraries on your machine 10 years from now. Depends on 280 other crates. Ye gads. "Yeah just use ancient binaries" is not a viable strategy for future-proofing. It's a lot easier to move fast and break things when you don't care about stability.
    - cbolton 3y ago
      $ ldd bin/typst statically linked
      - crotchfire 3y ago
        You faked this. `ldd` never prints just the text `statically linked` for a statically-linked binary. Here's the real output. $ ldd result/bin/typst linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffd2c4e5000) libgcc_s.so.1 => /nix/store/28d6zz06v3mpwdbi72fdw64qmmq8rhfm-gcc-13.2.0-lib/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f4fe68b9000) libm.so.6 => /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f4fe67d9000) libc.so.6 => /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f4fe4619000) /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /nix/store/7v29y7b3b38x2hpgld698fw6k5mffam8-glibc-2.38-44/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f4fe68e1000) You can't have truly statically linked binaries on glibc systems; they ditched support for that over a decade ago. On the 1% of Linux systems using Musl you can produce statically-linked binaries, but `ldd` will report `not a dynamic executable`. You faked your console output.
        3y ago
AlanYx 3y ago
Typst is exciting, but I wish their roadmap would prioritize features in common use in LaTeX like microtype rather than niche new features like style revocation.
- bscphil 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm curious if anyone with experience has comments on the typography quality of Typst, or whether that's even a focus at this point in time. There are a million document languages (DocBook, AsciiDoc, Markdown+extensions, LaTeX, etc etc) but LaTeX has the foothold it does (other than academic entrenchment) because of the output quality. I sometimes use Typst as an intermediate renderer with Pandoc, but for my highest quality work I insist on features like protrusion. I was using LibreOffice just yesterday and actually had to check multiple times whether there was a space at the beginning of the line because the lack of protrusion support meant unsightly visual gaps.
- mmplxx 3y ago
  Probably not as developed as microtype, but they have overhang, kerning and ligatures: https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text
- tapia 3y ago
  Microtype features are already incorporated. See this issue: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/261#issuecomment-1488692014 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/261#issuecomment-14886...
  - AlanYx 3y ago
    The only microtype feature currently supported in typst is overhang, and only for seven hardcoded punctuation characters. See the code here: https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/10a3fbd174fc1a3f95937c9120d478c8e94c277d/library/src/layout/par.rs#L1362 https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/10a3fbd174fc1a3f95937c91... It's basically a kludge; there's a lot more work needed to actually implement even overhang properly.
svat 3y ago
> Then the LuaTeX devs moved their efforts to LuaMetaTeX and I found myself scratching my head. This makes sense: They're essentially “done” with LuaTeX; it works fine and is distributed with TeX Live; it's up to others to use it. Many people are in environments (submission to journals that insist on pdfTeX etc) where they cannot use LuaTeX; the LuaTeX developers cannot change that. (It has minor differences from TeX/pdfTeX but they don't seem keen to fix it.) Meanwhile for those who are willing to use a new system, they might as well simplify (remove the backward-compatibility requirements) and make a better typesetting system more suited to the needs of ConTeXt. In other words, users can be divided into: - those who insist/need to use pdfTeX + LaTeX - those who are willing to try something different, for which there's ConTeXt (with lmtx) or (further afield) Typst, etc.
- YWall39 3y ago
  can I add a third class. - those who need latex+dvips+ps2pdf and if you ask why, 2 packages: psfrag and pstricks.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I'm just happy I can compile thirty year old documents.
fnands 3y ago
> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. From what I have seen, it's Overleaf. Do newer students know or care what flavour of Tex Overleaf uses in the background? Not as far as I have seen.
- miguelmurca 3y ago
  "Typst Overleaf" sounds like a fine business idea to me, if you give the user the option to export TeX (so that they can then submit it to a journal). (If you support both LaTeX and Typst, and improve the Overleaf experience somewhat -- which is definitely possible -- I can't imagine you wouldn't steal some market share from Overleaf.)
  - fnands 3y ago
    The Typst webapp [1] seems like it is already pretty similar to Overleaf. LaTeX output seems not to be on the roadmap [2], which I can respect. The amount of weirdness you would have to workaround to get good Typst to LaTeX translation sounds like a pain. I guess the hope is that the publishing industry starts adopting Typst... [1] https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/ [2] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/149 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/149
trueismywork 3y ago
Typst has nowhere the control and reproducibility of LuaTeX. It's core syntax is quite weak and will be a bottleneck in future. It is especially weak for structure of huge documents, and for mathematics. LuaTeX is stupid but it still has features needed which none of the other markup languages posses.
- SkiFire13 3y ago
  This is quite baseless without any proof or at least example.
4bpp 3y ago
Typst does look very nice based on the brief look I took at it, but besides the questions of adoption and entrenchment that have been raised in parallel comments, the choice of Rust as the implementation language is also concerning to me. I think that Rust and the community that surrounds it are associated with a newer, simultaneously somewhat trend-chasing and decidedly paternalistic culture of software engineering that does not mesh well with the longtermist demands of science and scientific publishing. Concretely, * Where LaTeX evidently favours doing whatever it takes to achieve a desired result (exhibit 1 being the article we are discussing), Rust itself and the culture that begot it are clearly on the side of decreeing a Right Way from high above and treating the possibility of deviating from it as a bug. In the light of the discussion in Footnote 7, I could for example imagine a Rust-minded typesetting system designer decreeing that unnumbered "displaystyle" math will not be supported. * Cultural acceptance of mandatory automatic updates means that backwards compatibility may actually be considered an anti-goal. * Cultural acceptance of ideology/politics in software engineering brings the danger of invasive conditions. What if, by way of an aggressively interpreted CoC, {receiving funding from military/police-aligned agencies, working with Russian collaborators, working with Iranian collaborators} becomes grounds for being excluded from issue discussions or package repositories? (I do take note that Typst does not currently show signs of doing anything like this, but the tone of the wider Rust community does have to be taken into account.) Of course all these concerns are speculative, but scientific papers can be a nightmare scenario of maintenance (half a year's worth of work, one-digit number of people in the world qualified to write, two-digit number of people who will bother to read). Under those constraints, some measure of paranoia feels appropriate.
- Ar-Curunir 3y ago
  Rust has enabled much better science at least in my field of Cryptography than whatever nonsense people wrote in C/C++ before. I have the feeling the same is true for other areas like Systems. And it's also laughable to claim that any research paper written in LaTeX is "maintained". It's a one-off job. Nobody is reusing their previous papers as submodules in new ones.
  - 4bpp 3y ago
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Many of the equations and syntax I used in my PhD work can't be written in Typst. For instance, Young Tableaus, or commutation diagrams. Or circuits generated from inline code. I am not even sure if it has been coded in a way to support such extensions. So I would not recommend a new PhD student (actually undergrad student) to learn Typst just yet.
- cbolton 3y ago
  Could you give some examples of these equations? The ecosystem for the kind of things you mention is expanding rapidly, have a look at these: https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher https://typst.app/universe/package/quill https://typst.app/universe/package/quill https://github.com/fenjalien/cirCeTZ https://github.com/fenjalien/cirCeTZ These are based on CeTZ: https://github.com/johannes-wolf/cetz https://github.com/johannes-wolf/cetz , a kind of TikZ for typst. I don't see anything for Young Tableaux but it should be easy to do based on that.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

YWall39 3y ago

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Very unlikely. A new PhD student may find it beneficial to write papers with someone who only uses latex. then why bother with typst? (and I really want typst to win)

kldx 3y ago
Typst is a single file binary. The preview packages are versioned too. If typst breaks the API in ten years, I'd still be able to download the old binary and make a PDF from scratch. I can't begin to imagine the complexity in installing multiple texlive distributions side by side.
- crotchfire 3y ago
  That old binary won't link with the shared libraries on your machine 10 years from now. Depends on 280 other crates. Ye gads. "Yeah just use ancient binaries" is not a viable strategy for future-proofing. It's a lot easier to move fast and break things when you don't care about stability.
  - cbolton 3y ago
    $ ldd bin/typst statically linked
    - crotchfire 3y ago
      You faked this. `ldd` never prints just the text `statically linked` for a statically-linked binary. Here's the real output. $ ldd result/bin/typst linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffd2c4e5000) libgcc_s.so.1 => /nix/store/28d6zz06v3mpwdbi72fdw64qmmq8rhfm-gcc-13.2.0-lib/lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f4fe68b9000) libm.so.6 => /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/libm.so.6 (0x00007f4fe67d9000) libc.so.6 => /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f4fe4619000) /nix/store/7x591g0d1kydp4dci0jvksi0qbn013v3-glibc-2.38-27/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /nix/store/7v29y7b3b38x2hpgld698fw6k5mffam8-glibc-2.38-44/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f4fe68e1000) You can't have truly statically linked binaries on glibc systems; they ditched support for that over a decade ago. On the 1% of Linux systems using Musl you can produce statically-linked binaries, but `ldd` will report `not a dynamic executable`. You faked your console output.
      - 3y ago

AlanYx 3y ago

Typst is exciting, but I wish their roadmap would prioritize features in common use in LaTeX like microtype rather than niche new features like style revocation.

bscphil 3y ago
Yeah, I'm curious if anyone with experience has comments on the typography quality of Typst, or whether that's even a focus at this point in time. There are a million document languages (DocBook, AsciiDoc, Markdown+extensions, LaTeX, etc etc) but LaTeX has the foothold it does (other than academic entrenchment) because of the output quality. I sometimes use Typst as an intermediate renderer with Pandoc, but for my highest quality work I insist on features like protrusion. I was using LibreOffice just yesterday and actually had to check multiple times whether there was a space at the beginning of the line because the lack of protrusion support meant unsightly visual gaps.
mmplxx 3y ago
Probably not as developed as microtype, but they have overhang, kerning and ligatures: https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text
tapia 3y ago
Microtype features are already incorporated. See this issue: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/261#issuecomment-1488692014 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/261#issuecomment-14886...
- AlanYx 3y ago
  The only microtype feature currently supported in typst is overhang, and only for seven hardcoded punctuation characters. See the code here: https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/10a3fbd174fc1a3f95937c9120d478c8e94c277d/library/src/layout/par.rs#L1362 https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/10a3fbd174fc1a3f95937c91... It's basically a kludge; there's a lot more work needed to actually implement even overhang properly.

svat 3y ago

> Then the LuaTeX devs moved their efforts to LuaMetaTeX and I found myself scratching my head. This makes sense: They're essentially “done” with LuaTeX; it works fine and is distributed with TeX Live; it's up to others to use it. Many people are in environments (submission to journals that insist on pdfTeX etc) where they cannot use LuaTeX; the LuaTeX developers cannot change that. (It has minor differences from TeX/pdfTeX but they don't seem keen to fix it.) Meanwhile for those who are willing to use a new system, they might as well simplify (remove the backward-compatibility requirements) and make a better typesetting system more suited to the needs of ConTeXt. In other words, users can be divided into: - those who insist/need to use pdfTeX + LaTeX - those who are willing to try something different, for which there's ConTeXt (with lmtx) or (further afield) Typst, etc.

YWall39 3y ago
can I add a third class. - those who need latex+dvips+ps2pdf and if you ask why, 2 packages: psfrag and pstricks.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I'm just happy I can compile thirty year old documents.

fnands 3y ago

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. From what I have seen, it's Overleaf. Do newer students know or care what flavour of Tex Overleaf uses in the background? Not as far as I have seen.

miguelmurca 3y ago
"Typst Overleaf" sounds like a fine business idea to me, if you give the user the option to export TeX (so that they can then submit it to a journal). (If you support both LaTeX and Typst, and improve the Overleaf experience somewhat -- which is definitely possible -- I can't imagine you wouldn't steal some market share from Overleaf.)
- fnands 3y ago
  The Typst webapp [1] seems like it is already pretty similar to Overleaf. LaTeX output seems not to be on the roadmap [2], which I can respect. The amount of weirdness you would have to workaround to get good Typst to LaTeX translation sounds like a pain. I guess the hope is that the publishing industry starts adopting Typst... [1] https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/ [2] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/149 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/149

trueismywork 3y ago

Typst has nowhere the control and reproducibility of LuaTeX. It's core syntax is quite weak and will be a bottleneck in future. It is especially weak for structure of huge documents, and for mathematics. LuaTeX is stupid but it still has features needed which none of the other markup languages posses.

SkiFire13 3y ago
This is quite baseless without any proof or at least example.

4bpp 3y ago

Typst does look very nice based on the brief look I took at it, but besides the questions of adoption and entrenchment that have been raised in parallel comments, the choice of Rust as the implementation language is also concerning to me. I think that Rust and the community that surrounds it are associated with a newer, simultaneously somewhat trend-chasing and decidedly paternalistic culture of software engineering that does not mesh well with the longtermist demands of science and scientific publishing. Concretely, * Where LaTeX evidently favours doing whatever it takes to achieve a desired result (exhibit 1 being the article we are discussing), Rust itself and the culture that begot it are clearly on the side of decreeing a Right Way from high above and treating the possibility of deviating from it as a bug. In the light of the discussion in Footnote 7, I could for example imagine a Rust-minded typesetting system designer decreeing that unnumbered "displaystyle" math will not be supported. * Cultural acceptance of mandatory automatic updates means that backwards compatibility may actually be considered an anti-goal. * Cultural acceptance of ideology/politics in software engineering brings the danger of invasive conditions. What if, by way of an aggressively interpreted CoC, {receiving funding from military/police-aligned agencies, working with Russian collaborators, working with Iranian collaborators} becomes grounds for being excluded from issue discussions or package repositories? (I do take note that Typst does not currently show signs of doing anything like this, but the tone of the wider Rust community does have to be taken into account.) Of course all these concerns are speculative, but scientific papers can be a nightmare scenario of maintenance (half a year's worth of work, one-digit number of people in the world qualified to write, two-digit number of people who will bother to read). Under those constraints, some measure of paranoia feels appropriate.

Ar-Curunir 3y ago
Rust has enabled much better science at least in my field of Cryptography than whatever nonsense people wrote in C/C++ before. I have the feeling the same is true for other areas like Systems. And it's also laughable to claim that any research paper written in LaTeX is "maintained". It's a one-off job. Nobody is reusing their previous papers as submodules in new ones.
- 4bpp 3y ago

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

Many of the equations and syntax I used in my PhD work can't be written in Typst. For instance, Young Tableaus, or commutation diagrams. Or circuits generated from inline code. I am not even sure if it has been coded in a way to support such extensions. So I would not recommend a new PhD student (actually undergrad student) to learn Typst just yet.

cbolton 3y ago
Could you give some examples of these equations? The ecosystem for the kind of things you mention is expanding rapidly, have a look at these: https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher https://typst.app/universe/package/quill https://typst.app/universe/package/quill https://github.com/fenjalien/cirCeTZ https://github.com/fenjalien/cirCeTZ These are based on CeTZ: https://github.com/johannes-wolf/cetz https://github.com/johannes-wolf/cetz , a kind of TikZ for typst. I don't see anything for Young Tableaux but it should be easy to do based on that.