7 ms·

Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/

fsiefken 1y ago
Typst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I prefer using it. But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement. The ecosystem is also larger. I have LaTex documents I struggle to convert.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - fsiefken 1y ago
    I know, i love pedal to the metal - small is beautiful, it's lean and mean, but it's not a replacement in some cases. As an alternative, tectonic is a bit faster then the standard LaTex distributions: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions/1153 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions... https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
JohnKemeny 1y ago
Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
- mr_mitm 1y ago
  I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.
  - Gualdrapo 1y ago
    I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM. Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt. Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
  - seanhunter 1y ago
    Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more. I'm sure you remember that quite clearly.
  - josephg 1y ago
    > Also, typst is just really good. Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a powerful enough tool. For example: - Boxes & named figures - Footnotes - Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files) - Comments - Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of contents) - Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.) I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today. Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I don't want to manually add <p> tags around my paragraphs like a savage.) Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!
    - mzl 1y ago
      MDX as a middle ground with most of the text standard markdown and the escape hatch of custom React JSX when needed has worked well for me.
      - josephg 1y ago
        MDX advertises itself as "markdown + components", but its not commonmark compatible. I tried using it a few years ago. In the process, I migrated over some regular markdown documents and they render incorrectly using MDX. I filed a bug (this was a few years ago) and I was told commonmark compatibility was an explicit non goal for the project. Meh.
        mzl 1y ago
        I didn't know that, that is unfortunate to hear.
    - godelski 1y ago
      You can do footnotes in markdown [^0] [^0]: it doesn't matter where this is placed, just that this one has a colon. The table of contents thing is annoying but it's not hard to write a little bash script. Sed and regex are all you need. > Markdown doesn't have enough features Markdown has too many features The issue is you're using the wrong tool. Markdown is not intended for making fancy documents or blogs, it's meant to be a deadass simple format that can be read in anything. Hell, its goal is to be readable in a text editor so its more about styling. If you really want to use it and have occasional fanciness, you can use html. But don't turn a tool that is explicitly meant to be simple into something complicated just because it doesn't have enough features. The lack of features is the point.
  - DocTomoe 1y ago
    Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu. When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it. LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly". (Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
    - einpoklum 1y ago
      > For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format Word still has a closed format. It supposedly standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually documented. There also used to be the problem of different renderings on different machines (even if you had all the relevant fonts installed): You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. I don't know if that's the case today. Granted, though, hangs and crashes and weird gibberish on opening a document are rare today.
      - DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
        > You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we were able to locate that problem in the printer driver that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't remember the details but it looked like Word was adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to destroy the finely balanced lines of our print publication (yes, an official public health periodical by a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there was a lot of manual typographical work in each print). Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of: automatically adjusts to your output device for best results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed environment).
  - ayhanfuat 1y ago
    Latex is not a company’s product. That’s a substantial difference.
    - goku12 1y ago
      How so? Only their web app seems to be closed source. And the company was created by the two project founders. They also don't seem to be doing a lot more than a community project.
    - mr_mitm 1y ago
      Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a different comment?
      - ayhanfuat 1y ago
        I meant if there is no company financially benefiting from that activity it is hard to call that marketing. But if there is a company especially if it is backed by VC that is a completely different story.
        mr_mitm 1y ago
        There is no VC with typst, they're bootstrapped. And I think by "marketeers" the original commenter did not mean actual marketing people, but enthusiastic fans. Unless it was a hidden accusation of astroturfing that I didn't get.
- js8 1y ago
  IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.
- __mharrison__ 1y ago
  When you are the only option marketing doesn't matter. I would suspect (based on my own experience) is that the reason folks shout "typst!" anytime they hear latex is that the user experience is 1000x better than latex.
- kyawzazaw 1y ago
  there definitely is. check any math or even cs department in universities
croemer 1y ago
Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693
- IshKebab 1y ago
  That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for equations and figures. That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users use it because of that! Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is actually fantastic.
  - croemer 1y ago
    TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.
    - IshKebab 1y ago
      A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people actually know it exists.
      - croemer 1y ago
        Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still appreciate that they have a long battery life.
  - billfruit 1y ago
    But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.
  - creata 1y ago
    > That's not why people use LaTeX. Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this feature, too.)
misnome 1y ago
“Pricing”, “Sign Up” Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach. There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.
- oytis 1y ago
  To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
- kzrdude 1y ago
  They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
  - red_trumpet 1y ago
    > sounds like a sane choice for a new company. It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.
    - oytis 1y ago
      Yeah, today's open source combines the worst from corporate jobs and social media. Typst looks nice though, but is indeed developed in a logic of a business
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Why is that a bad thing, though? To me this actually sounds a net positive for two reasons: first, there's a single coherent overarching design, and second, so long as their business model is sustainable, it means that the product won't suddenly disappear because of maintainer burnout etc.
- kaoD 1y ago
  Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer) but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net negative contributors to free software. So... yeah.
flanked-evergl 1y ago
[flagged]
- goku12 1y ago
  PDF is used for pre-formatted content with reproducible layout. HTML is used for dynamically formatted, dynamically laid out and often reflowable content. It's debatable whether PDF needs a more modern alternative, but HTML is certainly not a replacement for it. There are several use cases where HTML is not the appropriate choice - especially for carefully laid out documents or books. You can simulate pre-formatted layout in HTML, but it always feels like shoehorning an unintended functionality. LaTeX and Typst are markup primarily for PDF type contents. Something like Asciidoc or even Markdown is more appropriate for HTML type content. You can always switch the purposes, but I never got a satisfying output by doing that.
  - flanked-evergl 1y ago
    HTML with css paged media gets you reproducible layout without having to mess with Latex and keeps you in open toolchains that aren't two decades or more old without any significant improvement or advancement.
- anthk 1y ago
  PDF is preformatted, ready to print. HTML it's useless there.
  - flanked-evergl 1y ago
    Who prints things? pls.
cjs_ac 1y ago
For all the well-deserved complaints about TeX's and LaTeX's syntax, Typst only makes this worse, by repurposing even more characters as markup.
- blueflow 1y ago
  I'll put my finger on the perceived weak point: Which characters? Are they listed somewhere?
  - cjs_ac 1y ago
    Sure: the Typst syntax is detailed here: https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/ The non-control characters of ASCII are largely characters you might actually want to put in a document. TeX uses some of these as markup, e.g., the dollar sign to bracket maths mode and the ampersand as a column separator in tables. Typst takes this much further, using plus and minus signs to introduce list items, at signs for references, and so on. Ideally, all visible characters should produce themselves in the printed output, except for the backslash introducing control sequences that represent all of the markup and braces for delimiting the extent of parameters to those control sequences. This would produce a very predictable and easily-parsed syntax.
- SkiFire13 1y ago
  I don't think this was ever my issue with Latex, which instead are mostly: - the cryptic error messages and infinite logs - the unintuitive ways to do stuff like store a value for later use or sum two lengths - the very long compile times - the amount of reliance on global state from various packages, which contributes to even more cryptic errors or weird behavior when something goes wrong - various other quirks, e.g. the fact you often need to end a line with a comment or the newline will skrew up your content.
  - creata 1y ago
    I could deal with all of the other issues if it weren't for the absurdly long compile times. I wonder where most of that time is spent.
billfruit 1y ago
Asciidoc is also a good alternative. Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements? Major problems include: - Tables are a huge pain. - Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful. - Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should give you bold and italic, but such composability was not happening for a some functions. -Mixing of physical and logical formatting. -Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.
- phorkyas82 1y ago
  The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else. Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)
wewxjfq 1y ago
It seems to have a bus factor of 1.
billfruit 1y ago
Does it have better/easier tables. Does it support complex tables like with images in it, with alternating horizontal or vertical text in cells, tables inside tables, tables with alternative row/column shading, etc while still supporting automatic wrapping to contents, etc?
- mr_mitm 1y ago
  Yes https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/table/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/table/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/table-guide/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/table-guide/
Arrowmaster 1y ago
I recall a recent criticism of Typst being that it doesn't strip unused glyphs from fonts when making PDFs so they end up excessively large compared to other solutions. Has there been any change to that?
- laurmaedje 1y ago
  That's fixed, thanks to a community contribution! [1] For what it's worth, Typst did have font subsetting from the start, but it was rather bad for CFF-flavoured OpenType fonts. The same contributor has recently put a lot work into building a better foundation for Typst's PDF export [1], which decreases file sizes further, and brings many further benefits. [1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4373 https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4373 [2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/5420 https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/5420
matthewdgreen 1y ago
I live in fear that one of the major typesetting services like Overleaf will convince people to move away from a very durable standard and adopt something that’s much more change-oriented. Then we’ll all have to learn not one, but two standards. Rinse repeat.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

Typst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I prefer using it. But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement. The ecosystem is also larger. I have LaTex documents I struggle to convert.

koakuma-chan 1y ago
[flagged]
- fsiefken 1y ago
  I know, i love pedal to the metal - small is beautiful, it's lean and mean, but it's not a replacement in some cases. As an alternative, tectonic is a bit faster then the standard LaTex distributions: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions/1153 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions... https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

JohnKemeny 1y ago

Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.

mr_mitm 1y ago
I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.
- Gualdrapo 1y ago
  I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM. Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt. Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
- seanhunter 1y ago
  Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more. I'm sure you remember that quite clearly.
- josephg 1y ago
  > Also, typst is just really good. Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a powerful enough tool. For example: - Boxes & named figures - Footnotes - Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files) - Comments - Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of contents) - Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.) I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today. Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I don't want to manually add <p> tags around my paragraphs like a savage.) Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!
  - mzl 1y ago
    MDX as a middle ground with most of the text standard markdown and the escape hatch of custom React JSX when needed has worked well for me.
    - josephg 1y ago
      MDX advertises itself as "markdown + components", but its not commonmark compatible. I tried using it a few years ago. In the process, I migrated over some regular markdown documents and they render incorrectly using MDX. I filed a bug (this was a few years ago) and I was told commonmark compatibility was an explicit non goal for the project. Meh.
      - mzl 1y ago
        I didn't know that, that is unfortunate to hear.
  - godelski 1y ago
    You can do footnotes in markdown [^0] [^0]: it doesn't matter where this is placed, just that this one has a colon. The table of contents thing is annoying but it's not hard to write a little bash script. Sed and regex are all you need. > Markdown doesn't have enough features Markdown has too many features The issue is you're using the wrong tool. Markdown is not intended for making fancy documents or blogs, it's meant to be a deadass simple format that can be read in anything. Hell, its goal is to be readable in a text editor so its more about styling. If you really want to use it and have occasional fanciness, you can use html. But don't turn a tool that is explicitly meant to be simple into something complicated just because it doesn't have enough features. The lack of features is the point.
- DocTomoe 1y ago
  Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu. When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it. LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly". (Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
  - einpoklum 1y ago
    > For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format Word still has a closed format. It supposedly standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually documented. There also used to be the problem of different renderings on different machines (even if you had all the relevant fonts installed): You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. I don't know if that's the case today. Granted, though, hangs and crashes and weird gibberish on opening a document are rare today.
    - DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
      > You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we were able to locate that problem in the printer driver that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't remember the details but it looked like Word was adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to destroy the finely balanced lines of our print publication (yes, an official public health periodical by a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there was a lot of manual typographical work in each print). Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of: automatically adjusts to your output device for best results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed environment).
- ayhanfuat 1y ago
  Latex is not a company’s product. That’s a substantial difference.
  - goku12 1y ago
    How so? Only their web app seems to be closed source. And the company was created by the two project founders. They also don't seem to be doing a lot more than a community project.
  - mr_mitm 1y ago
    Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a different comment?
    - ayhanfuat 1y ago
      I meant if there is no company financially benefiting from that activity it is hard to call that marketing. But if there is a company especially if it is backed by VC that is a completely different story.
      - mr_mitm 1y ago
        There is no VC with typst, they're bootstrapped. And I think by "marketeers" the original commenter did not mean actual marketing people, but enthusiastic fans. Unless it was a hidden accusation of astroturfing that I didn't get.
js8 1y ago
IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.
__mharrison__ 1y ago
When you are the only option marketing doesn't matter. I would suspect (based on my own experience) is that the reason folks shout "typst!" anytime they hear latex is that the user experience is 1000x better than latex.
kyawzazaw 1y ago
there definitely is. check any math or even cs department in universities

croemer 1y ago

Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693

IshKebab 1y ago
That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for equations and figures. That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users use it because of that! Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is actually fantastic.
- croemer 1y ago
  TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people actually know it exists.
    - croemer 1y ago
      Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still appreciate that they have a long battery life.
- billfruit 1y ago
  But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.
- creata 1y ago
  > That's not why people use LaTeX. Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this feature, too.)

misnome 1y ago

“Pricing”, “Sign Up” Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach. There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.

oytis 1y ago
To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
kzrdude 1y ago
They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
- red_trumpet 1y ago
  > sounds like a sane choice for a new company. It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.
  - oytis 1y ago
    Yeah, today's open source combines the worst from corporate jobs and social media. Typst looks nice though, but is indeed developed in a logic of a business
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Why is that a bad thing, though? To me this actually sounds a net positive for two reasons: first, there's a single coherent overarching design, and second, so long as their business model is sustainable, it means that the product won't suddenly disappear because of maintainer burnout etc.
kaoD 1y ago
Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer) but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net negative contributors to free software. So... yeah.

flanked-evergl 1y ago

[flagged]

goku12 1y ago
PDF is used for pre-formatted content with reproducible layout. HTML is used for dynamically formatted, dynamically laid out and often reflowable content. It's debatable whether PDF needs a more modern alternative, but HTML is certainly not a replacement for it. There are several use cases where HTML is not the appropriate choice - especially for carefully laid out documents or books. You can simulate pre-formatted layout in HTML, but it always feels like shoehorning an unintended functionality. LaTeX and Typst are markup primarily for PDF type contents. Something like Asciidoc or even Markdown is more appropriate for HTML type content. You can always switch the purposes, but I never got a satisfying output by doing that.
- flanked-evergl 1y ago
  HTML with css paged media gets you reproducible layout without having to mess with Latex and keeps you in open toolchains that aren't two decades or more old without any significant improvement or advancement.
anthk 1y ago
PDF is preformatted, ready to print. HTML it's useless there.
- flanked-evergl 1y ago
  Who prints things? pls.

cjs_ac 1y ago

For all the well-deserved complaints about TeX's and LaTeX's syntax, Typst only makes this worse, by repurposing even more characters as markup.

blueflow 1y ago
I'll put my finger on the perceived weak point: Which characters? Are they listed somewhere?
- cjs_ac 1y ago
  Sure: the Typst syntax is detailed here: https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/ The non-control characters of ASCII are largely characters you might actually want to put in a document. TeX uses some of these as markup, e.g., the dollar sign to bracket maths mode and the ampersand as a column separator in tables. Typst takes this much further, using plus and minus signs to introduce list items, at signs for references, and so on. Ideally, all visible characters should produce themselves in the printed output, except for the backslash introducing control sequences that represent all of the markup and braces for delimiting the extent of parameters to those control sequences. This would produce a very predictable and easily-parsed syntax.
SkiFire13 1y ago
I don't think this was ever my issue with Latex, which instead are mostly: - the cryptic error messages and infinite logs - the unintuitive ways to do stuff like store a value for later use or sum two lengths - the very long compile times - the amount of reliance on global state from various packages, which contributes to even more cryptic errors or weird behavior when something goes wrong - various other quirks, e.g. the fact you often need to end a line with a comment or the newline will skrew up your content.
- creata 1y ago
  I could deal with all of the other issues if it weren't for the absurdly long compile times. I wonder where most of that time is spent.

billfruit 1y ago

Asciidoc is also a good alternative. Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements? Major problems include: - Tables are a huge pain. - Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful. - Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should give you bold and italic, but such composability was not happening for a some functions. -Mixing of physical and logical formatting. -Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.

IshKebab 1y ago
Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.
phorkyas82 1y ago
The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else. Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)

wewxjfq 1y ago

It seems to have a bus factor of 1.

billfruit 1y ago

Does it have better/easier tables. Does it support complex tables like with images in it, with alternating horizontal or vertical text in cells, tables inside tables, tables with alternative row/column shading, etc while still supporting automatic wrapping to contents, etc?

mr_mitm 1y ago
Yes https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/table/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/table/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/table-guide/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/table-guide/

Arrowmaster 1y ago

I recall a recent criticism of Typst being that it doesn't strip unused glyphs from fonts when making PDFs so they end up excessively large compared to other solutions. Has there been any change to that?

laurmaedje 1y ago
That's fixed, thanks to a community contribution! [1] For what it's worth, Typst did have font subsetting from the start, but it was rather bad for CFF-flavoured OpenType fonts. The same contributor has recently put a lot work into building a better foundation for Typst's PDF export [1], which decreases file sizes further, and brings many further benefits. [1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4373 https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4373 [2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/5420 https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/5420

matthewdgreen 1y ago

I live in fear that one of the major typesetting services like Overleaf will convince people to move away from a very durable standard and adopt something that’s much more change-oriented. Then we’ll all have to learn not one, but two standards. Rinse repeat.

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