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I tried Typst, which everyone seems to be saying is a replacement for LaTeX. Yes, Typst does get some stuff right and is easier to use in some cases. But LaTeX

I tried Typst, which everyone seems to be saying is a replacement for LaTeX. Yes, Typst does get some stuff right and is easier to use in some cases. But LaTeX works out of the box with some basic document styles without learning much, and doesn't give you the freedom of a blank document. In the end I gave up Typst. Didn't like it. Yes, Typst might be better for some but for writing basic documents like an article or basic math paper, Typst didn't work for me.

iso8859-1 2y ago
OP's article is not about LaTeX. Why are we discussing Typst and LaTeX in this thread? They're not what OP's article is about.
- echoangle 2y ago
  Isn’t LaTeX the most popular way of using TeX? Why is it bad to compare that to alternatives? It’s like writing an article about Python and someone comments about speed differences between Cpython and Julia. Sure, Cpython isn’t Python, but isn’t that still valid and interesting?
  - iso8859-1 2y ago
    The amount of non-LaTeX TeX users is larger than the CPython user fraction. If TeX gets fixed in the way OP is dreaming about (but doesn't actually detail), it probably wouldn't be compatible with LaTeX. Just like many styles aren't compatible with ConTeXt.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      > The amount of non-LaTeX TeX users is larger than the CPython user fraction. No way, I found no good statistic about it but I would be surprised if Cpython was under 80% of user share among python implementations. The comments don’t have to be exactly what the article is talking about, it was just mentioning another direction typesetting could evolve. The article is about improving TeX, and someone made a comment about typst, which claims to be a LaTeX successor. Do you not see how that is relevant to the article?
constantcrying 2y ago
What? You can init to a standard template. The syntax is significantly simpler and definitely easier to learn, it resembles something like markdown for simple things, a huge step up from LaTeX. I can not imagine someone having an easier time with (La)TeX than with Typist, when starting from zero.
tombert 2y ago
Honestly the thing that I always find myself coming back to is Pandoc + Markdown, and then rendering the document with XeLaTeX. I personally find markdown very easy to write and parse on the fly, and it has a pretty straightforward transformation to LaTeX so I get pretty documents. I can also easily render it to other formats if I need to. Pandoc rocks.

iso8859-1 2y ago

OP's article is not about LaTeX. Why are we discussing Typst and LaTeX in this thread? They're not what OP's article is about.

echoangle 2y ago
Isn’t LaTeX the most popular way of using TeX? Why is it bad to compare that to alternatives? It’s like writing an article about Python and someone comments about speed differences between Cpython and Julia. Sure, Cpython isn’t Python, but isn’t that still valid and interesting?
- iso8859-1 2y ago
  The amount of non-LaTeX TeX users is larger than the CPython user fraction. If TeX gets fixed in the way OP is dreaming about (but doesn't actually detail), it probably wouldn't be compatible with LaTeX. Just like many styles aren't compatible with ConTeXt.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    > The amount of non-LaTeX TeX users is larger than the CPython user fraction. No way, I found no good statistic about it but I would be surprised if Cpython was under 80% of user share among python implementations. The comments don’t have to be exactly what the article is talking about, it was just mentioning another direction typesetting could evolve. The article is about improving TeX, and someone made a comment about typst, which claims to be a LaTeX successor. Do you not see how that is relevant to the article?

constantcrying 2y ago

What? You can init to a standard template. The syntax is significantly simpler and definitely easier to learn, it resembles something like markdown for simple things, a huge step up from LaTeX. I can not imagine someone having an easier time with (La)TeX than with Typist, when starting from zero.

tombert 2y ago

Honestly the thing that I always find myself coming back to is Pandoc + Markdown, and then rendering the document with XeLaTeX. I personally find markdown very easy to write and parse on the fly, and it has a pretty straightforward transformation to LaTeX so I get pretty documents. I can also easily render it to other formats if I need to. Pandoc rocks.