5 ms·

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.
    - josephg 1y ago
      > The issue is you're using the wrong tool. Yes, I think we're in violent agreement that markdown is the wrong tool for the job. That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using markdown, with its anaemic feature set (eg mdbook). Even markdown + inline HTML is wildly inadequate. For example, you can't make automatically numbered sections. Or figures with links in the text. Or a ToC. And so on. Try and attach a caption to an image and you're basically hand authoring your document in crappy HTML. So I agree with you. I don't think the answer is "markdown++" with comments, templating and scripting support. I think the answer is something else. Something which has considered the needs of authoring documents from the start. Something like typst.
- 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

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.
  - josephg 1y ago
    > The issue is you're using the wrong tool. Yes, I think we're in violent agreement that markdown is the wrong tool for the job. That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using markdown, with its anaemic feature set (eg mdbook). Even markdown + inline HTML is wildly inadequate. For example, you can't make automatically numbered sections. Or figures with links in the text. Or a ToC. And so on. Try and attach a caption to an image and you're basically hand authoring your document in crappy HTML. So I agree with you. I don't think the answer is "markdown++" with comments, templating and scripting support. I think the answer is something else. Something which has considered the needs of authoring documents from the start. Something like typst.
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