10 ms·

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

532 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

rossant 1y ago
Great work. Screenshots would be nice.
Svoka 1y ago
I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo. Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
  It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell. I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current needs (or where needs just didn't change) is fine, but it's not the case of LaTeX.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    XeTeX handles Unicode fine, but that's definitely one area where TeX shows its age and its extensibility didn't, I think, allow Lamport to make a real difference.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
      I have heard about it, but it isn't viable for me to switch to it because most academic journals and conferences have templates incompatible with XeTeX, or directly ask for the sources and compile them with pdflatex. This is the same reason why it isn't viable for me to switch to typst either, by the way. I hope it gains popularity and ends up as a standard displacing (or along with) pdflatex.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  I appreciate your postscript. I don't use TeX or vim out of nostalgia; I didn't discover TeX until I was a senior in undergrad, and I think I didn't discover vim until after I finished my Ph.D. I use vim because it seems best for its tasks, given the way I think (though maybe I think that way because I'm old). I use TeX because I write math for a living and have invested a huge amount of time using it, so that it's become intuitive to me even though I know it wouldn't be for a newcomer, and I can't be bothered to break long-established habits until I know an alternative will be established everywhere TeX is.
- andrepd 1y ago
  Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality typesetting with an emphasis on maths.
- commandersaki 1y ago
  These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX: 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling. 2. Compiling is instant. 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style). 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier. 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks. 7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.
  - gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
    > 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}. > 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks. TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic line breaks and version control should work equally well with both LaTeX and Typst. (I agree with all your other points though)
    - mr_mitm 1y ago
      I think what the GP means is that whitespace is often not ignored by LaTeX, so line breaks can cause extra wide spaces between words. It's common to comment out the line break in LaTeX for this reason. This is much less of an issue in Typst (if at all) due to the separation of code and content. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use-of-percent-signs-at-the-end-of-lines-why-is-my-macro-creat https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use...
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have no idea what was going on, and most makefiles out there seem to be obscenely complex and simply parse the output and run the same commands again if a certain set of errors occurred.
- shusaku 1y ago
  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.
  - tom_ 1y ago
    My makefiles ran it 4 times, i think. I still preferred it to Word.
    - lblume 1y ago
      Anything is preferable to Microsoft Word.
  - SkiFire13 1y ago
    TBF Typst internally also recompiles a bunch of times until a fixpoint is reached, however it is designed to limit what parts can depend on the previous iterations and to reuse previous results for parts that definitely didn't change.
  - a5c11 1y ago
    Last time I checked, flipping a coin twice gave different results.
    - _Algernon_ 1y ago
TimorousBestie 1y ago
I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly. Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.
- nomel 1y ago
  mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point. [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/ https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/
  - andrepd 1y ago
    I'll only say that learning typst is easier than learning LaTeX. It also has first class support for unicode (as does LaTeX via some packages) which if combined with a suitable keyboard layout makes both writing and reading math source code infinitely more pleasant :)
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- wenc 1y ago
  Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code. I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff. Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots. Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package development time. Now they also have to compete with the millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.
tiagod 1y ago
I've used Typst to generate reports in multiple languages and it works pretty well for this! I just pass typst JSON with the report data and use it from there.
- lblume 1y ago
  Especially in combination with file watching. Your script writes to the JSON file and the entire document and everything that depends on it updates automatically, often in less than a second.
BiteCode_dev 1y ago
Pro tips: type long content unformatted, or barely formatted, then ask an LLM to format it using your markup of choice, then clean up the thing it got wrong. They are very decent at inferring the context of stuff and will mark code, maths, titles so on farely decently. This lets you focus on the work of making it looks nice.
- RestartKernel 1y ago
  I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.
  - aziis98 1y ago
    I successfully converted a typst report to md/mdx last week using this technique. For complex layout primitives I just told the llm to write a comment with a warning todo of the missing part it wasn't able to convert
  - dkga 1y ago
    Well you can always diff the document. If it's not too large, then manually inspect it. If too long, then pipe the diff into the clipboard and send it to another LLM to summarise the changes.
  - BiteCode_dev 1y ago
    The LLM are already good enough to not do that anymore. Worst case scenario, you get wrong formatting, but not wrong content. Markdown + pandoc is not the same: you need already basic formatting. You have to think about the formatting. For example, math formulas and code are gnarly to type, so I have snippets for them to avoid getting out of the flow. But LLM don't need that, you can just dump your thoughts, and they format it.
- andrepd 1y ago
  Jesus
octernion 1y ago
i switched all of our pdf generation to typst - fantastic software. love how efficient it is; it makes previewing trivial and iteration very fast.
- brtv 1y ago
  Interesting! Did you use a tool to do the conversion automatically? How did it pick up on custom packages and styling?
  - octernion 1y ago
    well it was a mix of word and markdown files being converted before; converting the word files was somewhat annoying but iirc i exported them and converted those. i wrote all the custom styling we used; pretty straightforward
shermantanktop 1y ago
Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.
- iNic 1y ago
  People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    The problem with gearheads is that they can displace their passion for the activity itself onto the gear around the activity...and get better at having gear but not get better at the activity. E.g., guitarists who own 80 of the same guitar and spend many hours on the internet arguing about tiny variations in what Fender was doing in 1961. And then they put out a video and it turns out they can barely play guitar at all. I wouldn't exactly criticize them for that choice, but it's definitely a choice. Or maybe not a conscious choice, because the road to improvement is hard, but the road to more gear is loaded with honeypots of dopamine.
- nailer 1y ago
  I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.
- Swizec 1y ago
  > Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.
  - xigoi 1y ago
commandersaki 1y ago
In case anyone hasn't seen some typst source and renders, here's a few documents I whipped up: First is based on Todd C. Miller's Latex Resume Template: - https://typst.app/project/rDUHMUg5vxl4jQ5q2grGPY https://typst.app/project/rDUHMUg5vxl4jQ5q2grGPY Second is a Enduring Power of Attorney: - https://typst.app/project/rs9ZgGLhgM7iPvFs7PQv5O https://typst.app/project/rs9ZgGLhgM7iPvFs7PQv5O Third a will: - https://typst.app/project/r45dVk6MpLjsoXMvxkTxsE https://typst.app/project/r45dVk6MpLjsoXMvxkTxsE
pityJuke 1y ago
Glad to hear Typst has people doing serious work with it. I’ve been able to avoid LaTeX. At uni, I went for org-mode -> LaTeX, which was OK except when my .emacs file was filling up with LaTeX stuff to make random stuff work. To be honest, that means I probably can’t even compile it again if I wanted to. Typst has been awesome (always ran into LaTeX just being horribly inconsistent when layout stuff) when I’ve used it. Hope it continues.
- veunes 1y ago
  Typst really does feel refreshing in that sense… way less fiddly and a lot more predictable, especially for layout tweaks
vessenes 1y ago
I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine has some additional vertical control for long documents that latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Maybe in another year or six months!
- dkga 1y ago
  Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?
  - vessenes 1y ago
    An llm friendly language spec would help, I’d guess. FWIW it’s a common long tail language issue — everybody’s realll good at python and typescript, things fall off from there
- the-wumpus 1y ago
  I understand why people like using LLMs for coding, saves them having to think, but it is deeply frustrating to see it being such a crutch that some people cannot use new tools without it. I suppose the issue is not new, many people didn't want to use new lanuages before because they couldn't copy snippets from the internet, but it was frustrating then too.
  - vessenes 1y ago
    You’re going to be frustrated a long time into the future I would guess. I’ve been coding since before the camel book was published: at that time it was basically ask Larry Wall on Usenet or a local bearded guru if you weren’t in a university setting and wanted to learn to code. I can hand craft code in many a language; I can also do fine wooden joinery. When a project has value to me in the completion and hours to completion is my metric then a cnc machine or an llm is a great tool, and allows me to make things that aren’t “worth” hand coding. When I want to work on a technical skill or just get in the flow I code by hand or use my wood tools. Upshot: different strokes for different folks.
dkga 1y ago
Nice debrief. I think tough some of the downsides the author mentions can be addressed relatively easily with quarto, which has embraces Typst since its early days as I recall. Especially the bibliography issue.
shrinks99 1y ago
Very cool! I ran into the multiple bibliography issue when attempting to typeset my grandmother's PHD thesis which I was able to rescue from the 5.25" floppies it was originally stored on. I was planning on waiting until they solved this officially to resume that side project, but might give Alexandria a shot!
- thezoq2 1y ago
  That sounds like a fun project! Alexandria is the way to go for now but hopefully they will get proper support for it sooner rather than later.
irundebian 1y ago
It can be hard to write macros with state in typst.
- lblume 1y ago
  It is hard to write macros in LaTeX.
freehorse 1y ago
What deters me from Typst is that latex math syntax is nowadays ubiquitous. You write $x^2=1$ and it renders in many places. Learning a new syntax for math expressions is simply not in my interests.
- the-wumpus 1y ago
  To be fair $x^2=1$ literally works in typst.
- kzrdude 1y ago
  The threat is literally the opposite, it is very freeing to be able to write typst syntax because it's quicker and easier to write. But then you're cursed by the fact that every other place now uses latex math syntax by convention.
- Paapaa 1y ago
  It is very fast to learn the Typst math syntax. It is easy and intuitive and usually less verbose than LaTeX. It should not be a difficult thing to learn for most people.
dleslie 1y ago
In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part and implementing critical features in the closed source portion. Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.
- the-wumpus 1y ago
  I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source. Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally. I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0 version so it's mostly maintenance) is that packages are automatically downloaded from the typst site, but an open repo can trivially be made considering that the set of packages used is just from a open source git repo and the closed source site just hosts tar.gz files of the folders in the repo. Not a big deal I think.
  - dleslie 1y ago
    They have a deep incentive to drive users to subscribe, and that's directly at odds with keeping all of the document rendering open source. It makes a lot of sense for them to provide document features that are only available to subscribers.
    - the-wumpus 1y ago
      They have some incentive to drive users to subscribe, but they have other forms of income, and I think if they ever implemented even a single feature of actual rendering that was closed source their community would riot and we'd get a community managed fork (probably by the guy who does the language server...). The only way they can continue to gain traction is if they never ever in any way lock people to the web app. Documents must be portable, it's part of why someone would want typst anyways. I do not see a future where this happens, and if it does it will be because the typst org has changed hands and is also no longer particularly relevant to the future of typst the language.
agnishom 1y ago
Congratulations to the author. I have to agree that Typst source generally looks a lot less uglier than LaTeX. I considered writing stuff in Typst many times, but I couldn't master the courage to do so.
gumbojuice 1y ago
I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?
- Zariff 1y ago
  I'm not familiar with how journal submissions work, but don't you simply submit a pdf at the end? Does it matter what engine you used to render it?
  - jltsiren 1y ago
    You normally submit a LaTeX or Word document, and the publisher does the final typesetting. Even in computer science, where people often spend a lot of time tweaking the typesetting, the pdf generated by the authors is essentially a preview. There are often visible differences between it and the publisher's version.
    - IshKebab 1y ago
      Yeah this is one of the craziest things about the scientific publishing industry. Journals justify their fees by claiming its for typesetting, but all they are really doing is adding extra work to nit pick bibliography formats and so on (see the comments in this article about sentence case). Nobody cares about that. I don't think anyone even reads "journals" any more (except maybe Nature/Science etc.). They mostly just read individual papers and then there's no consistency to maintain. In a sane world journals would accept PDFs. They would check that the format roughly matches what they expect but not insist on doing the type setting themselves. Oh well, maybe one day.
      - aragilar 1y ago
        I would note arXiv requires the source as well, and having the source is what is enabling the HTML experiments they're doing. On consistency, what the journals provide is some level of QA (how much is a function of field and journal, rather than the what is charges), and the template is the journal's brand, so both the authors and journals benefit from the style (I can tell the difference between the different (all similar quality) journals in my field at a glance by the style). It's also worth noting that there's a whole much of metadata that needs to be collected (whether you agree with it or not, funders require it), so a PDF isn't going to cut it here either.
KnuthIsGod 1y ago
Typist will probably be dead or acquihired in a few years. Latex will be around for decades.
- lblume 1y ago
  The Typst compiler is completely open-source. I prefer my local copy of the Typst compiler and CLI to whatever LaTeX provides right now already, and there seems to be a still growing community that could keep the project going even after a malicious acquisition of some kind.
Syzygies 1y ago
AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are far more concise than LaTeX source. I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the right touch for working with AI on topological research and code. It's hard to find good advice. Like surfing, the hardest part is all these people on the beach whining how the waves are kind of rough. AI can actually read SVG math diagrams better than most people. AI doesn't like reading LaTeX source any more than I do. I get the journal argument, but really? Some thawed-out-of-a-glacier journal editors still insist on two column formats, as if anyone still prints to paper. I'm old enough to not care. I'm thinking of publishing my work as a silent animation, and only later reluctantly releasing my AI prompts in the form of Typst documentation for the code.
- nxpnsv 1y ago
  Printing is still not uncommon in professional scientific environments. When you actually have to read a paper, it turns out that actual paper is quite convenient.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  Personally, I write for humans.
- veunes 1y ago
  The idea of publishing as an animation + Typst doc actually sounds pretty compelling… the old PDF format is starting to feel pretty stale
- a5c11 1y ago
  > AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. That's AI which must adapt, not humans. If AI can't adapt then it can't be considered intelligent. > Some thawed-out-of-a-glacier journal editors still insist on two column formats, as if anyone still prints to paper. Narrow text is easier to read because you don't have to travel kilometres with your eyes. I purposely shrink width of the browser when reading longer texts.
aitchnyu 1y ago
Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.
- lblume 1y ago
  I have so far not been able to get a major LLM to generate fully functional Typst code, no matter how much context I try to put into it. The models do not seem to currently understand Typst's concept of modes (code, markup and math) and especially in code mode suffers from heavy hallucination of syntax and/or semantics.
- patall 1y ago
  Maybe if it's completely distinct. Else definitely no, unless, maybe, if the model is fine-tuned. Had a discussion about it with my dad whos work is developing in a non-mainstream SmallTalk dialect where it doesn't work at all.
- ykonstant 1y ago
  I suppose it also depends on the specific LLM; the output of a free/low-cost model will likely be very different from a $200/month o1-pro.
- V__ 1y ago
  I tried using ChatGPT for Typst a few weeks ago. I had it open and didn't want to search the documentation. The output was totally wrong it, functions which didn't exist and syntax errors. Your mileage may vary.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Bayes7 1y ago
| „[…] was a friend telling me his LaTeX thesis took 90 seconds to compile towards the end“ Sure, but in order to iterate you won’t have to compile the whole document but can just keep the chapter you are working on by structuring it with \includes
thomasfl 1y ago
Why not use javascript, JSX and TypScript to produce PDF? You use the language you know already.
- xigoi 1y ago
  Since when is TypeScript a typesetting engine?
- barrucadu 1y ago
  Why would you want to implement an entire typesetting engine yourself?
veunes 1y ago
The ecosystem issues and rough edges in bibliography handling don't surprise me, but the fact that you could script so much directly inside the doc is really appealing
JustFinishedBSG 1y ago
Is Typst’s typesetting quality on par with « bare » LaTeX ? with LaTeX + microtype ? It may be stupid and vain but for me if it doesn’t at least match the former it’s a no-go
- Paapaa 1y ago
  Yes, it uses a very similar algorith as LaTeX. It also incorporates already some microtype features out of the box. So the typesetting quality is very good and easily comparable to LaTeX. Working with Typst is so much easier and faster than with LaTeX so you will be more productive. Many things can be done without resorting to external packages and scripting is a breeze compared to LaTeX. Just try it out. It is free, open source and very easy to setup. Just install the extension Tinymist on VSCode, that is all you need.
- thezoq2 1y ago
  Until 0.13 it wasn't quite as good as latex in my experience, it mainly inserted more hyphens than LaTeX. As of this version, it would be very hard to tell a difference in my experience
msravi 1y ago
I have only two peeves with typst. 1. They should have carried forward the latex standard as-is for math, instead of getting rid of the backslash escape sequence, etc. 2. There is no way to share a variable across a file's scope - so can't have a setting that is shared across files - not even with state variables. Other than this, typst is solid, and with the neovim editor and tinymist lsp, is great to write with.
- cbolton 1y ago
  Regarding point 1: I'm so glad they didn't keep the math syntax, there's finally progress in math text input! E.g. we can now write $ ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1, ... } \ QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ } $ $ a = cases( 0 & quad x <= 0, mat(1, 2; 3, 4) vec(x, y) & quad x > 0 ) $ instead of \begin{align*} \mathbb{Z} &= \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\ \mathbb{Q} &= \left\{ \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\} \end{align*} \[ a = \begin{cases} 0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\ \begin{pmatrix}1 & 2\\ 3 & 4\end{pmatrix} \begin{pmatrix}5\\6\end{pmatrix} & \quad x > 0 \end{cases} \] Regarding point 2: you can put your settings in a file `settings.typ` and import it from multiple files.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - aragilar 1y ago
    You could use unicode-maths?
  - davemp 1y ago
    Agreed. I’ve done a far bit of math in both and typst’s choices are way more memorable and ergonomic. It’s not like keeping the syntax would really gain typst anything besides folks not having learn new things.
  - msravi 1y ago
    > Regarding point 2: you can put your settings in a file `settings.typ` and import it from multiple files. Let's say I have 3 flavors of settings and 10 different typ files - normally I'd just have 3 flavors of top.typ (top1.typ, top2.typ, top3.typ) with the correct settings for each flavor with settings proagated to all 10 files. Compiling top1/top2/top3 would then create flavor1.pdf, flavor2.pdf, and flavor3.pdf Now how do I do it with settings1.typ, settings2.typ and settings3.typ? I have to go into the 10 different files and include the appropriate settings file! Or employ hacks like creating a common settings.typ using bash in the Makefile and including the common settings.typ in the 10 different files. Edit: This is an actual use case - I'm helping with a resume, and have 3 different resume styles - a resume, a cv, and a timeline - and different files like education, work experience, honors, awards, publications, projects, etc and the level of detail, style, and what is included or not in each is controlled by which resume style is active. In latex I did this using \newcommand and the ifthenelse package. In typst, I have had to resort to passing these global settings as arguments to functions spread across these different files, so each resume item (function) instantiated from the top file has a bunch of parameters like detail_level = 1, audited_courses = true, prefix_year = false, event_byline = true, include_url = true, etc., which make the functions unweildy.
wosined 1y ago
Why not LyX or TeXmacs? Both seem to be better options than yet another markup language.
- GiovanniP 1y ago
  In addition to making it possible to write easily, TeXmacs is also based on a markup language. It demonstrates that a markup language and WYSIWYG writing can coexist efficiently.
retorquere 1y ago
> But in the Bibtex file it is very common for the titles to appear in their original title case form That is common because they are following the rules about how to steer capitalisation when using bib(la)tex: - If the entry is in English, and the style demands title case, output as is - If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence case, convert to sentence-case and output - If the entry is not in English, output as is
- thoroughburro 1y ago
  > If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence case, convert to sentence-case and output Nope: not possible to automatically determine which capitalised nouns are proper (and thus remain capitalised in sentence case) and which are common (and thus become uncapitalised). This is in fact why it is better to store sentence case: it can be unambiguously converted to title case while the reverse is ambiguous. It’s not mere preference.
dwayne_dibley 1y ago
Does Mendeley perform any better here than it does with overleaf?
sydon 1y ago
Congrats OP on your PhD!
poulpy123 1y ago
I tried typst a year ago, and I found it really nice to use compared to Latex. I even managed to make (or modify I don't remember) a small module to customize boxes, something I would not have even though of trying with latex. I don't use latex anymore and I don't have a use case for typst, so I'm not currently using it, but I follow the advancements from time to time, and I have to disagree with the advisor. Typst is perfectly fine for replacing latex in almost any place that doesn't require the latex source. The other case is because tthe ecosystem is much smaller so if you need a specific extension that does not exist or is not trivial to implement you'll be out of luck, and you'll be stuck with latex.
codeape 1y ago
From https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/: "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content." IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use an outdated piece of typesetting software that is a) hard to configure, b) hard to use and c) produces output for the least useful reading platform available (paged pdfs). And the pronounciation is stupid.
- tiffanyh 1y ago
  Do you feel the same about Markdown? Just curious.
  - codeape 1y ago
    No, I like Markdown.
- lolinder 1y ago
  Alternatively, they're people who write documents in a field where LaTeX is the standard, they're not computer savvy enough to try to even look for something new that might be acceptable or might compile to LaTeX, and at any rate they want to focus more on their research than they do on changing the typesetting norms in their field. (No shade on people who do decide to use alternatives, and Typst is great!)
- JohnKemeny 1y ago
  > IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling [...] I hope you are aware that literally all research in mathematics and computer science is typed up and published in LaTeX?
  - codeape 1y ago
    Imagine the rapid advancements we could make in those fields if researchers stop wasting time on a baroque, outdated typesetting system.
jonathanstrange 1y ago
I've never had a big complaint about LaTeX, it's easy to get into and the results are stunning if you use it minimally and with care. They only thing I've always been missing was a way to make it easier to have perfect register-true typesetting for books. This has to do with LaTeX's paragraph flow algorithm and lack of global optimization, or so I've been told. Can Typst provide better register-true layout? That would be interesting to me.
rcpt 1y ago
It's been a decade since I wrote anything in LaTeX and I echo all it's pain points. But it seems like LaTeX is the kind of thing that LLMs would nail perfectly. I feel like using it today wouldn't be very bad.
CodesInChaos 1y ago
Generally Typst looks like a significant improvment over LaTeX to me. The language is cleaner and easier to understand, and the first class scripting support is appealing. Its embeddability and templating features make it an interesting option for automated PDF generation (e.g. invoices) as well. However its handling of introspection and convergence gives me a bad feeling.
neilv 1y ago
Related work: Racket has Scribble, which is used for some books, academic papers, and a lot of package API docs. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html#%28part._first-example%29 https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html#%... Although it doesn't look like Scheme, it has the full power of Scheme.
cbondurant 1y ago
The initial motivation of LaTeX compile times being slow is very interesting to me. I use LaTeX as a tool for layout of books to print for hobby bookbinding and my current project - a 3 megabyte, 500k word beast of a novel - only takes around 10 seconds to compile. I cant imagine what the friend of the author here had going on in his paper such that his compile times took such a hit. Required use of specific LaTeX libraries dictated by the journals he was submitting to that were written inefficiently? specific LaTeX features or packages that end up hitting significantly slower codepaths? Makes me wonder if its not LaTeX itself that is the speed issue but instead the very maturity of the ecosystem that it has as advantage over Typst. It could entirely be possible that once Typst has the wide berth of features and functionality available through its ecosystem, that it would become just as easy to fall into compile time tarpits.
- noelwelsh 1y ago
  My experience is the same as OP: Typst is significantly faster than Latex. My book has all of table of contents, parts and chapters, figures, code samples, tables, images, and bibliography. These are all going to require multiple passes to layout. E.g. you cannot insert page numbers until you have laid out the table of contents, as it comes before other content. However you cannot construct the table of contents before you have processed the rest of the document. A typical novel won't have most of these, and so I think it will be substantially easier to layout.
- xhkkffbf 1y ago
  A few parts are dramatically slower. Images for me, for instance, really slow down the compilation, especially if latex needs to read a high definition image into memory. Raw text like that from a novel is very fast.
- jdranczewski 1y ago
  PhD theses often have many figures, and these are often not optimised. My thesis is around 30MB, and that's after I optimised a couple of the most egregious figures. I'm planning to make it better in the corrections phase, but file size is really not something most people will be concerned in the writing phase, and so compile times are likely to suffer. For further reference, a single-pass compilation of my thesis currently takes 25 seconds, and multiple passes are of course needed if the layout/bibliography changes. I ended up setting up TeXstudio to always compile only once for the preview, and then run the full N complications for the final build. That plus liberal use of \includeonly made compile times not that much of an issue
lizimo 1y ago
We [1] have been using Typst to generate PDF documents in production for a few months, such as invoices and labels. It's generating thousands of documents daily, and I'm glad that some of them are printed and used by people in the warehouse who are doing real work. I really like the simple syntax that Typst provides. It would be much harder for the PMs to edit the templates if we went with other solutions, such as wkhtmltopdf. We also looked into other document generation services that provide a WYSIWYG interface, and they are all quite expensive and often lack advanced scripting capabilities. [1] https://garnercorp.com/ https://garnercorp.com/
- lol768 1y ago
  How have you found the generation performance? It seems like this should really be a perfect fit for this sort of use-case, and I'd hope the memory footprint and speed are all much more competitive than HTML-based approaches. The team I'm currently working with are using Gotenberg for things which we can afford to take a little while, and C#/Skia for things which need to be reasonably quick.
  - ManBeardPc 1y ago
    I only experienced a couple milliseconds for small documents of 15 pages or so. It’s reasonably fast to show the user the result „immediately“ on changes. Haven’t checked memory usage.
  - lizimo 1y ago
    Most of the documents are generated in an instant, plus we deployed this on Kubernetes with HPA, so high load isn't an issue. The main issue I found with an HTML-based approach is that browsers are not designed for papers. It would be very challenging, but still possible [1], to customize the page layout, headers, and footers. Nonetheless, we have even more advanced use cases that only Typst/LaTex could cater to, such as displaying the table header of a table that spans multiple pages on every page. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_media_queries/Printing https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_media_q...
- film42 1y ago
stefanos82 1y ago
I keep an eye on https://github.com/let-def/texpresso https://github.com/let-def/texpresso which is a live rendering and error reporting for LaTeX; just watch the videos that are in README and you will get amazed!
- lol768 1y ago
  This is very cool; I wish it was supported by the TeXiFy-IDEA plugin.
- imtringued 1y ago
  Please tell the setzer developers about this: https://github.com/cvfosammmm/Setzer/ https://github.com/cvfosammmm/Setzer/
fabiensanglard 1y ago
I am working with typst for my next book. This framework has been a dream. I am SO happy I never have to touch LateX again.
- skywal_l 1y ago
  What will it be about? (please say Quake Black Book)
crossroadsguy 1y ago
I just want a a very simple Markdown like syntax to make a very basic resume with just few features that are not in Md: - custom spacing - horizontal/vertical (after list dots/numbers etc as well) - justifying the text - custom margins And for that something like this is an overkill. Less than Tex but still an overkill. Hell, I can do with a flavoured markdown if it supports this.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
  i don't know if this is more than you're willing to do, but i think a lot of markdown processors allow you to specify custom CSS (which would allow you to do what you're looking for, if rendering to HTML). it's a pain compared to standard markdown but if you can figure out the underlying HTML tags you're trying to style, it should be a one-and-done change.
  - crossroadsguy 1y ago
    I shall definitely explore that.
- alok-g 1y ago
  +1. Having to write HTML for what should be basics is a non-starter for many. I can't, for examole, recommend Markdown to a lawyer friend, and the formatting that courts in my country mandate cannot ve done in Markdown.
  - crossroadsguy 1y ago
    I will see if there’s some app that supports https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html | https://www.speakon.org.uk/MarkupBinder/beta/docs/Markdown/Pandoc_Markdown_vs_standard_Markdown.html https://www.speakon.org.uk/MarkupBinder/beta/docs/Markdown/P...
xiaohanyu 1y ago
One thing that LaTeX still win is CJK support, typst is still very young and lacks professional support for non-latin languages: https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines#conclusion-3 https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines#concl... I admit that typst is quite promising and given enough time, its adoption will increase quite a lot.

532 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

Great work. Screenshots would be nice.

I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo. Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.

Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell. I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current needs (or where needs just didn't change) is fine, but it's not the case of LaTeX.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  XeTeX handles Unicode fine, but that's definitely one area where TeX shows its age and its extensibility didn't, I think, allow Lamport to make a real difference.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
    I have heard about it, but it isn't viable for me to switch to it because most academic journals and conferences have templates incompatible with XeTeX, or directly ask for the sources and compile them with pdflatex. This is the same reason why it isn't viable for me to switch to typst either, by the way. I hope it gains popularity and ends up as a standard displacing (or along with) pdflatex.
JadeNB 1y ago
I appreciate your postscript. I don't use TeX or vim out of nostalgia; I didn't discover TeX until I was a senior in undergrad, and I think I didn't discover vim until after I finished my Ph.D. I use vim because it seems best for its tasks, given the way I think (though maybe I think that way because I'm old). I use TeX because I write math for a living and have invested a huge amount of time using it, so that it's become intuitive to me even though I know it wouldn't be for a newcomer, and I can't be bothered to break long-established habits until I know an alternative will be established everywhere TeX is.
andrepd 1y ago
Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality typesetting with an emphasis on maths.
commandersaki 1y ago
These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX: 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling. 2. Compiling is instant. 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style). 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier. 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks. 7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.
- gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
  > 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}. > 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks. TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic line breaks and version control should work equally well with both LaTeX and Typst. (I agree with all your other points though)
  - mr_mitm 1y ago
    I think what the GP means is that whitespace is often not ignored by LaTeX, so line breaks can cause extra wide spaces between words. It's common to comment out the line break in LaTeX for this reason. This is much less of an issue in Typst (if at all) due to the separation of code and content. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use-of-percent-signs-at-the-end-of-lines-why-is-my-macro-creat https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use...

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

Typst looks really promising, especially due to the fact that it had common templates (like the IEEE one) which produce content identical to LaTeX. My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work. I still have no idea what was going on, and most makefiles out there seem to be obscenely complex and simply parse the output and run the same commands again if a certain set of errors occurred.

shusaku 1y ago
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.
- tom_ 1y ago
  My makefiles ran it 4 times, i think. I still preferred it to Word.
  - lblume 1y ago
    Anything is preferable to Microsoft Word.
- SkiFire13 1y ago
  TBF Typst internally also recompiles a bunch of times until a fixpoint is reached, however it is designed to limit what parts can depend on the previous iterations and to reuse previous results for parts that definitely didn't change.
- a5c11 1y ago
  Last time I checked, flipping a coin twice gave different results.
  - _Algernon_ 1y ago

TimorousBestie 1y ago

I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly. Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.

nomel 1y ago
mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point. [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/ https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/
- andrepd 1y ago
  I'll only say that learning typst is easier than learning LaTeX. It also has first class support for unicode (as does LaTeX via some packages) which if combined with a suitable keyboard layout makes both writing and reading math source code infinitely more pleasant :)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
wenc 1y ago
Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code. I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff. Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots. Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package development time. Now they also have to compete with the millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.

tiagod 1y ago

I've used Typst to generate reports in multiple languages and it works pretty well for this! I just pass typst JSON with the report data and use it from there.

lblume 1y ago
Especially in combination with file watching. Your script writes to the JSON file and the entire document and everything that depends on it updates automatically, often in less than a second.

BiteCode_dev 1y ago

Pro tips: type long content unformatted, or barely formatted, then ask an LLM to format it using your markup of choice, then clean up the thing it got wrong. They are very decent at inferring the context of stuff and will mark code, maths, titles so on farely decently. This lets you focus on the work of making it looks nice.

RestartKernel 1y ago
I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.
- aziis98 1y ago
  I successfully converted a typst report to md/mdx last week using this technique. For complex layout primitives I just told the llm to write a comment with a warning todo of the missing part it wasn't able to convert
- dkga 1y ago
  Well you can always diff the document. If it's not too large, then manually inspect it. If too long, then pipe the diff into the clipboard and send it to another LLM to summarise the changes.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago
  The LLM are already good enough to not do that anymore. Worst case scenario, you get wrong formatting, but not wrong content. Markdown + pandoc is not the same: you need already basic formatting. You have to think about the formatting. For example, math formulas and code are gnarly to type, so I have snippets for them to avoid getting out of the flow. But LLM don't need that, you can just dump your thoughts, and they format it.
andrepd 1y ago
Jesus

octernion 1y ago

i switched all of our pdf generation to typst - fantastic software. love how efficient it is; it makes previewing trivial and iteration very fast.

brtv 1y ago
Interesting! Did you use a tool to do the conversion automatically? How did it pick up on custom packages and styling?
- octernion 1y ago
  well it was a mix of word and markdown files being converted before; converting the word files was somewhat annoying but iirc i exported them and converted those. i wrote all the custom styling we used; pretty straightforward

shermantanktop 1y ago

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

iNic 1y ago
People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  The problem with gearheads is that they can displace their passion for the activity itself onto the gear around the activity...and get better at having gear but not get better at the activity. E.g., guitarists who own 80 of the same guitar and spend many hours on the internet arguing about tiny variations in what Fender was doing in 1961. And then they put out a video and it turns out they can barely play guitar at all. I wouldn't exactly criticize them for that choice, but it's definitely a choice. Or maybe not a conscious choice, because the road to improvement is hard, but the road to more gear is loaded with honeypots of dopamine.
nailer 1y ago
I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.
Swizec 1y ago
> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.
- xigoi 1y ago

commandersaki 1y ago

In case anyone hasn't seen some typst source and renders, here's a few documents I whipped up: First is based on Todd C. Miller's Latex Resume Template: - https://typst.app/project/rDUHMUg5vxl4jQ5q2grGPY https://typst.app/project/rDUHMUg5vxl4jQ5q2grGPY Second is a Enduring Power of Attorney: - https://typst.app/project/rs9ZgGLhgM7iPvFs7PQv5O https://typst.app/project/rs9ZgGLhgM7iPvFs7PQv5O Third a will: - https://typst.app/project/r45dVk6MpLjsoXMvxkTxsE https://typst.app/project/r45dVk6MpLjsoXMvxkTxsE

pityJuke 1y ago

Glad to hear Typst has people doing serious work with it. I’ve been able to avoid LaTeX. At uni, I went for org-mode -> LaTeX, which was OK except when my .emacs file was filling up with LaTeX stuff to make random stuff work. To be honest, that means I probably can’t even compile it again if I wanted to. Typst has been awesome (always ran into LaTeX just being horribly inconsistent when layout stuff) when I’ve used it. Hope it continues.

veunes 1y ago
Typst really does feel refreshing in that sense… way less fiddly and a lot more predictable, especially for layout tweaks

vessenes 1y ago

I was on the typst train, particularly because its layout engine has some additional vertical control for long documents that latex lacks. However, just about when I was looking at moving over, LLM coding became good or at least good enough, and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst. Really bad. Maybe in another year or six months!

dkga 1y ago
Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?
- vessenes 1y ago
  An llm friendly language spec would help, I’d guess. FWIW it’s a common long tail language issue — everybody’s realll good at python and typescript, things fall off from there
the-wumpus 1y ago
I understand why people like using LLMs for coding, saves them having to think, but it is deeply frustrating to see it being such a crutch that some people cannot use new tools without it. I suppose the issue is not new, many people didn't want to use new lanuages before because they couldn't copy snippets from the internet, but it was frustrating then too.
- vessenes 1y ago
  You’re going to be frustrated a long time into the future I would guess. I’ve been coding since before the camel book was published: at that time it was basically ask Larry Wall on Usenet or a local bearded guru if you weren’t in a university setting and wanted to learn to code. I can hand craft code in many a language; I can also do fine wooden joinery. When a project has value to me in the completion and hours to completion is my metric then a cnc machine or an llm is a great tool, and allows me to make things that aren’t “worth” hand coding. When I want to work on a technical skill or just get in the flow I code by hand or use my wood tools. Upshot: different strokes for different folks.

dkga 1y ago

Nice debrief. I think tough some of the downsides the author mentions can be addressed relatively easily with quarto, which has embraces Typst since its early days as I recall. Especially the bibliography issue.

shrinks99 1y ago

Very cool! I ran into the multiple bibliography issue when attempting to typeset my grandmother's PHD thesis which I was able to rescue from the 5.25" floppies it was originally stored on. I was planning on waiting until they solved this officially to resume that side project, but might give Alexandria a shot!

thezoq2 1y ago
That sounds like a fun project! Alexandria is the way to go for now but hopefully they will get proper support for it sooner rather than later.

irundebian 1y ago

It can be hard to write macros with state in typst.

lblume 1y ago
It is hard to write macros in LaTeX.

freehorse 1y ago

What deters me from Typst is that latex math syntax is nowadays ubiquitous. You write $x^2=1$ and it renders in many places. Learning a new syntax for math expressions is simply not in my interests.

the-wumpus 1y ago
To be fair $x^2=1$ literally works in typst.
kzrdude 1y ago
The threat is literally the opposite, it is very freeing to be able to write typst syntax because it's quicker and easier to write. But then you're cursed by the fact that every other place now uses latex math syntax by convention.
Paapaa 1y ago
It is very fast to learn the Typst math syntax. It is easy and intuitive and usually less verbose than LaTeX. It should not be a difficult thing to learn for most people.

dleslie 1y ago

In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part and implementing critical features in the closed source portion. Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.

the-wumpus 1y ago
I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source. Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally. I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0 version so it's mostly maintenance) is that packages are automatically downloaded from the typst site, but an open repo can trivially be made considering that the set of packages used is just from a open source git repo and the closed source site just hosts tar.gz files of the folders in the repo. Not a big deal I think.
- dleslie 1y ago
  They have a deep incentive to drive users to subscribe, and that's directly at odds with keeping all of the document rendering open source. It makes a lot of sense for them to provide document features that are only available to subscribers.
  - the-wumpus 1y ago
    They have some incentive to drive users to subscribe, but they have other forms of income, and I think if they ever implemented even a single feature of actual rendering that was closed source their community would riot and we'd get a community managed fork (probably by the guy who does the language server...). The only way they can continue to gain traction is if they never ever in any way lock people to the web app. Documents must be portable, it's part of why someone would want typst anyways. I do not see a future where this happens, and if it does it will be because the typst org has changed hands and is also no longer particularly relevant to the future of typst the language.

agnishom 1y ago

Congratulations to the author. I have to agree that Typst source generally looks a lot less uglier than LaTeX. I considered writing stuff in Typst many times, but I couldn't master the courage to do so.

gumbojuice 1y ago

I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?

Zariff 1y ago
I'm not familiar with how journal submissions work, but don't you simply submit a pdf at the end? Does it matter what engine you used to render it?
- jltsiren 1y ago
  You normally submit a LaTeX or Word document, and the publisher does the final typesetting. Even in computer science, where people often spend a lot of time tweaking the typesetting, the pdf generated by the authors is essentially a preview. There are often visible differences between it and the publisher's version.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Yeah this is one of the craziest things about the scientific publishing industry. Journals justify their fees by claiming its for typesetting, but all they are really doing is adding extra work to nit pick bibliography formats and so on (see the comments in this article about sentence case). Nobody cares about that. I don't think anyone even reads "journals" any more (except maybe Nature/Science etc.). They mostly just read individual papers and then there's no consistency to maintain. In a sane world journals would accept PDFs. They would check that the format roughly matches what they expect but not insist on doing the type setting themselves. Oh well, maybe one day.
    - aragilar 1y ago
      I would note arXiv requires the source as well, and having the source is what is enabling the HTML experiments they're doing. On consistency, what the journals provide is some level of QA (how much is a function of field and journal, rather than the what is charges), and the template is the journal's brand, so both the authors and journals benefit from the style (I can tell the difference between the different (all similar quality) journals in my field at a glance by the style). It's also worth noting that there's a whole much of metadata that needs to be collected (whether you agree with it or not, funders require it), so a PDF isn't going to cut it here either.

KnuthIsGod 1y ago

Typist will probably be dead or acquihired in a few years. Latex will be around for decades.

lblume 1y ago
The Typst compiler is completely open-source. I prefer my local copy of the Typst compiler and CLI to whatever LaTeX provides right now already, and there seems to be a still growing community that could keep the project going even after a malicious acquisition of some kind.

Syzygies 1y ago

AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. It's all about semantic compression: Typst source, markdown, and asciidoc are far more concise than LaTeX source. I'm observing, not here to convince anyone. The last six months of my life have been turned upside down, trying to discover the right touch for working with AI on topological research and code. It's hard to find good advice. Like surfing, the hardest part is all these people on the beach whining how the waves are kind of rough. AI can actually read SVG math diagrams better than most people. AI doesn't like reading LaTeX source any more than I do. I get the journal argument, but really? Some thawed-out-of-a-glacier journal editors still insist on two column formats, as if anyone still prints to paper. I'm old enough to not care. I'm thinking of publishing my work as a silent animation, and only later reluctantly releasing my AI prompts in the form of Typst documentation for the code.

nxpnsv 1y ago
Printing is still not uncommon in professional scientific environments. When you actually have to read a paper, it turns out that actual paper is quite convenient.
suddenlybananas 1y ago
Personally, I write for humans.
veunes 1y ago
The idea of publishing as an animation + Typst doc actually sounds pretty compelling… the old PDF format is starting to feel pretty stale
a5c11 1y ago
> AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format. That's AI which must adapt, not humans. If AI can't adapt then it can't be considered intelligent. > Some thawed-out-of-a-glacier journal editors still insist on two column formats, as if anyone still prints to paper. Narrow text is easier to read because you don't have to travel kilometres with your eyes. I purposely shrink width of the browser when reading longer texts.

aitchnyu 1y ago

Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.

lblume 1y ago
I have so far not been able to get a major LLM to generate fully functional Typst code, no matter how much context I try to put into it. The models do not seem to currently understand Typst's concept of modes (code, markup and math) and especially in code mode suffers from heavy hallucination of syntax and/or semantics.
patall 1y ago
Maybe if it's completely distinct. Else definitely no, unless, maybe, if the model is fine-tuned. Had a discussion about it with my dad whos work is developing in a non-mainstream SmallTalk dialect where it doesn't work at all.
ykonstant 1y ago
I suppose it also depends on the specific LLM; the output of a free/low-cost model will likely be very different from a $200/month o1-pro.
V__ 1y ago
I tried using ChatGPT for Typst a few weeks ago. I had it open and didn't want to search the documentation. The output was totally wrong it, functions which didn't exist and syntax errors. Your mileage may vary.

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Bayes7 1y ago

| „[…] was a friend telling me his LaTeX thesis took 90 seconds to compile towards the end“ Sure, but in order to iterate you won’t have to compile the whole document but can just keep the chapter you are working on by structuring it with \includes

thomasfl 1y ago

Why not use javascript, JSX and TypScript to produce PDF? You use the language you know already.

xigoi 1y ago
Since when is TypeScript a typesetting engine?
barrucadu 1y ago
Why would you want to implement an entire typesetting engine yourself?

veunes 1y ago

The ecosystem issues and rough edges in bibliography handling don't surprise me, but the fact that you could script so much directly inside the doc is really appealing

JustFinishedBSG 1y ago

Is Typst’s typesetting quality on par with « bare » LaTeX ? with LaTeX + microtype ? It may be stupid and vain but for me if it doesn’t at least match the former it’s a no-go

Paapaa 1y ago
Yes, it uses a very similar algorith as LaTeX. It also incorporates already some microtype features out of the box. So the typesetting quality is very good and easily comparable to LaTeX. Working with Typst is so much easier and faster than with LaTeX so you will be more productive. Many things can be done without resorting to external packages and scripting is a breeze compared to LaTeX. Just try it out. It is free, open source and very easy to setup. Just install the extension Tinymist on VSCode, that is all you need.
thezoq2 1y ago
Until 0.13 it wasn't quite as good as latex in my experience, it mainly inserted more hyphens than LaTeX. As of this version, it would be very hard to tell a difference in my experience

msravi 1y ago

I have only two peeves with typst. 1. They should have carried forward the latex standard as-is for math, instead of getting rid of the backslash escape sequence, etc. 2. There is no way to share a variable across a file's scope - so can't have a setting that is shared across files - not even with state variables. Other than this, typst is solid, and with the neovim editor and tinymist lsp, is great to write with.

cbolton 1y ago
Regarding point 1: I'm so glad they didn't keep the math syntax, there's finally progress in math text input! E.g. we can now write $ ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1, ... } \ QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ } $ $ a = cases( 0 & quad x <= 0, mat(1, 2; 3, 4) vec(x, y) & quad x > 0 ) $ instead of \begin{align*} \mathbb{Z} &= \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\ \mathbb{Q} &= \left\{ \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\} \end{align*} \[ a = \begin{cases} 0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\ \begin{pmatrix}1 & 2\\ 3 & 4\end{pmatrix} \begin{pmatrix}5\\6\end{pmatrix} & \quad x > 0 \end{cases} \] Regarding point 2: you can put your settings in a file `settings.typ` and import it from multiple files.
- deleted 1y ago
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- aragilar 1y ago
  You could use unicode-maths?
- davemp 1y ago
  Agreed. I’ve done a far bit of math in both and typst’s choices are way more memorable and ergonomic. It’s not like keeping the syntax would really gain typst anything besides folks not having learn new things.
- msravi 1y ago
  > Regarding point 2: you can put your settings in a file `settings.typ` and import it from multiple files. Let's say I have 3 flavors of settings and 10 different typ files - normally I'd just have 3 flavors of top.typ (top1.typ, top2.typ, top3.typ) with the correct settings for each flavor with settings proagated to all 10 files. Compiling top1/top2/top3 would then create flavor1.pdf, flavor2.pdf, and flavor3.pdf Now how do I do it with settings1.typ, settings2.typ and settings3.typ? I have to go into the 10 different files and include the appropriate settings file! Or employ hacks like creating a common settings.typ using bash in the Makefile and including the common settings.typ in the 10 different files. Edit: This is an actual use case - I'm helping with a resume, and have 3 different resume styles - a resume, a cv, and a timeline - and different files like education, work experience, honors, awards, publications, projects, etc and the level of detail, style, and what is included or not in each is controlled by which resume style is active. In latex I did this using \newcommand and the ifthenelse package. In typst, I have had to resort to passing these global settings as arguments to functions spread across these different files, so each resume item (function) instantiated from the top file has a bunch of parameters like detail_level = 1, audited_courses = true, prefix_year = false, event_byline = true, include_url = true, etc., which make the functions unweildy.

wosined 1y ago

Why not LyX or TeXmacs? Both seem to be better options than yet another markup language.

GiovanniP 1y ago
In addition to making it possible to write easily, TeXmacs is also based on a markup language. It demonstrates that a markup language and WYSIWYG writing can coexist efficiently.

retorquere 1y ago

> But in the Bibtex file it is very common for the titles to appear in their original title case form That is common because they are following the rules about how to steer capitalisation when using bib(la)tex: - If the entry is in English, and the style demands title case, output as is - If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence case, convert to sentence-case and output - If the entry is not in English, output as is

thoroughburro 1y ago
> If the entry is in English, and the style demands sentence case, convert to sentence-case and output Nope: not possible to automatically determine which capitalised nouns are proper (and thus remain capitalised in sentence case) and which are common (and thus become uncapitalised). This is in fact why it is better to store sentence case: it can be unambiguously converted to title case while the reverse is ambiguous. It’s not mere preference.

dwayne_dibley 1y ago

Does Mendeley perform any better here than it does with overleaf?

sydon 1y ago

Congrats OP on your PhD!

poulpy123 1y ago

I tried typst a year ago, and I found it really nice to use compared to Latex. I even managed to make (or modify I don't remember) a small module to customize boxes, something I would not have even though of trying with latex. I don't use latex anymore and I don't have a use case for typst, so I'm not currently using it, but I follow the advancements from time to time, and I have to disagree with the advisor. Typst is perfectly fine for replacing latex in almost any place that doesn't require the latex source. The other case is because tthe ecosystem is much smaller so if you need a specific extension that does not exist or is not trivial to implement you'll be out of luck, and you'll be stuck with latex.

codeape 1y ago

From https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/: "LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content." IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use an outdated piece of typesetting software that is a) hard to configure, b) hard to use and c) produces output for the least useful reading platform available (paged pdfs). And the pronounciation is stupid.

tiffanyh 1y ago
Do you feel the same about Markdown? Just curious.
- codeape 1y ago
  No, I like Markdown.
lolinder 1y ago
Alternatively, they're people who write documents in a field where LaTeX is the standard, they're not computer savvy enough to try to even look for something new that might be acceptable or might compile to LaTeX, and at any rate they want to focus more on their research than they do on changing the typesetting norms in their field. (No shade on people who do decide to use alternatives, and Typst is great!)
JohnKemeny 1y ago
> IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling [...] I hope you are aware that literally all research in mathematics and computer science is typed up and published in LaTeX?
- codeape 1y ago
  Imagine the rapid advancements we could make in those fields if researchers stop wasting time on a baroque, outdated typesetting system.

jonathanstrange 1y ago

I've never had a big complaint about LaTeX, it's easy to get into and the results are stunning if you use it minimally and with care. They only thing I've always been missing was a way to make it easier to have perfect register-true typesetting for books. This has to do with LaTeX's paragraph flow algorithm and lack of global optimization, or so I've been told. Can Typst provide better register-true layout? That would be interesting to me.

rcpt 1y ago

It's been a decade since I wrote anything in LaTeX and I echo all it's pain points. But it seems like LaTeX is the kind of thing that LLMs would nail perfectly. I feel like using it today wouldn't be very bad.

CodesInChaos 1y ago

Generally Typst looks like a significant improvment over LaTeX to me. The language is cleaner and easier to understand, and the first class scripting support is appealing. Its embeddability and templating features make it an interesting option for automated PDF generation (e.g. invoices) as well. However its handling of introspection and convergence gives me a bad feeling.

neilv 1y ago

Related work: Racket has Scribble, which is used for some books, academic papers, and a lot of package API docs. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html#%28part._first-example%29 https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html#%... Although it doesn't look like Scheme, it has the full power of Scheme.

cbondurant 1y ago

The initial motivation of LaTeX compile times being slow is very interesting to me. I use LaTeX as a tool for layout of books to print for hobby bookbinding and my current project - a 3 megabyte, 500k word beast of a novel - only takes around 10 seconds to compile. I cant imagine what the friend of the author here had going on in his paper such that his compile times took such a hit. Required use of specific LaTeX libraries dictated by the journals he was submitting to that were written inefficiently? specific LaTeX features or packages that end up hitting significantly slower codepaths? Makes me wonder if its not LaTeX itself that is the speed issue but instead the very maturity of the ecosystem that it has as advantage over Typst. It could entirely be possible that once Typst has the wide berth of features and functionality available through its ecosystem, that it would become just as easy to fall into compile time tarpits.

noelwelsh 1y ago
My experience is the same as OP: Typst is significantly faster than Latex. My book has all of table of contents, parts and chapters, figures, code samples, tables, images, and bibliography. These are all going to require multiple passes to layout. E.g. you cannot insert page numbers until you have laid out the table of contents, as it comes before other content. However you cannot construct the table of contents before you have processed the rest of the document. A typical novel won't have most of these, and so I think it will be substantially easier to layout.
xhkkffbf 1y ago
A few parts are dramatically slower. Images for me, for instance, really slow down the compilation, especially if latex needs to read a high definition image into memory. Raw text like that from a novel is very fast.
jdranczewski 1y ago
PhD theses often have many figures, and these are often not optimised. My thesis is around 30MB, and that's after I optimised a couple of the most egregious figures. I'm planning to make it better in the corrections phase, but file size is really not something most people will be concerned in the writing phase, and so compile times are likely to suffer. For further reference, a single-pass compilation of my thesis currently takes 25 seconds, and multiple passes are of course needed if the layout/bibliography changes. I ended up setting up TeXstudio to always compile only once for the preview, and then run the full N complications for the final build. That plus liberal use of \includeonly made compile times not that much of an issue

lizimo 1y ago

We [1] have been using Typst to generate PDF documents in production for a few months, such as invoices and labels. It's generating thousands of documents daily, and I'm glad that some of them are printed and used by people in the warehouse who are doing real work. I really like the simple syntax that Typst provides. It would be much harder for the PMs to edit the templates if we went with other solutions, such as wkhtmltopdf. We also looked into other document generation services that provide a WYSIWYG interface, and they are all quite expensive and often lack advanced scripting capabilities. [1] https://garnercorp.com/ https://garnercorp.com/

lol768 1y ago
How have you found the generation performance? It seems like this should really be a perfect fit for this sort of use-case, and I'd hope the memory footprint and speed are all much more competitive than HTML-based approaches. The team I'm currently working with are using Gotenberg for things which we can afford to take a little while, and C#/Skia for things which need to be reasonably quick.
- ManBeardPc 1y ago
  I only experienced a couple milliseconds for small documents of 15 pages or so. It’s reasonably fast to show the user the result „immediately“ on changes. Haven’t checked memory usage.
- lizimo 1y ago
  Most of the documents are generated in an instant, plus we deployed this on Kubernetes with HPA, so high load isn't an issue. The main issue I found with an HTML-based approach is that browsers are not designed for papers. It would be very challenging, but still possible [1], to customize the page layout, headers, and footers. Nonetheless, we have even more advanced use cases that only Typst/LaTex could cater to, such as displaying the table header of a table that spans multiple pages on every page. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_media_queries/Printing https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_media_q...
film42 1y ago

stefanos82 1y ago

I keep an eye on https://github.com/let-def/texpresso https://github.com/let-def/texpresso which is a live rendering and error reporting for LaTeX; just watch the videos that are in README and you will get amazed!

lol768 1y ago
This is very cool; I wish it was supported by the TeXiFy-IDEA plugin.
imtringued 1y ago
Please tell the setzer developers about this: https://github.com/cvfosammmm/Setzer/ https://github.com/cvfosammmm/Setzer/

fabiensanglard 1y ago

I am working with typst for my next book. This framework has been a dream. I am SO happy I never have to touch LateX again.

skywal_l 1y ago
What will it be about? (please say Quake Black Book)

crossroadsguy 1y ago

I just want a a very simple Markdown like syntax to make a very basic resume with just few features that are not in Md: - custom spacing - horizontal/vertical (after list dots/numbers etc as well) - justifying the text - custom margins And for that something like this is an overkill. Less than Tex but still an overkill. Hell, I can do with a flavoured markdown if it supports this.

GuinansEyebrows 1y ago
i don't know if this is more than you're willing to do, but i think a lot of markdown processors allow you to specify custom CSS (which would allow you to do what you're looking for, if rendering to HTML). it's a pain compared to standard markdown but if you can figure out the underlying HTML tags you're trying to style, it should be a one-and-done change.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  I shall definitely explore that.
alok-g 1y ago
+1. Having to write HTML for what should be basics is a non-starter for many. I can't, for examole, recommend Markdown to a lawyer friend, and the formatting that courts in my country mandate cannot ve done in Markdown.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  I will see if there’s some app that supports https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html | https://www.speakon.org.uk/MarkupBinder/beta/docs/Markdown/Pandoc_Markdown_vs_standard_Markdown.html https://www.speakon.org.uk/MarkupBinder/beta/docs/Markdown/P...

xiaohanyu 1y ago

One thing that LaTeX still win is CJK support, typst is still very young and lacks professional support for non-latin languages: https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines#conclusion-3 https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines#concl... I admit that typst is quite promising and given enough time, its adoption will increase quite a lot.