4 ms·

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all of that, but it is just both bad DX and bad UX. It feels like you need to be a hardcore LaTeX expert or consult with one, in order to accomplish the most mundane things. Especially in a reliable way, that won’t break upon making seemingly unrelated changes, or won’t break other things itself. I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable. I guess that is the difference between an ad hoc macro system and an actually thought through programming language. The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. That is, however, counteracted by being able to do things on your own, without immersing yourself deeply in LaTeX for years. Also, it will improve with time. LaTeX is great, don’t get me wrong. But its heritage and historical baggage is really dragging it down.

mcookly 6mo ago
I agree re. LaTeX. I've tried Typst for some complex projects, and it's just not quite there yet. ConTeXt on the other hand ... chef's kiss.
krater23 6mo ago
I know exactly what you mean, and that paired with a community that is absolutely sure that they know exactly how things need to be done and everyone that wants it in another way is dumb.
noelwelsh 6mo ago
This mirrors my experience. It's worth noting that TeX was developed in the same time period that the details of lexical scope were being nailed down by Guy Steele in the Rabbit compiler for Scheme. It's not that TeX is an ad hoc system; it's more the case that people didn't actually know how to implement a better system at the time.
- groos 6mo ago
  'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.
  - tialaramex 6mo ago
    That's true. Do you know who else won a Turing Award? Tony Hoare. What is Tony famous for? Well, lots of things, including his very important comparison sort algorithm Quicksort, but, in this context how about the Billion Dollar Mistake ? That's a pretty nasty booboo in many programming languages for which Tony blames himself because it was his idea. Like your parent said, TeX shipped a long time ago and we learned a lot since then, it is not a surprise that we know how to do better today, in fact it would be a serious black mark for Computer Science if we couldn't.
  - drob518 6mo ago
    Which means what, exactly.
- amszmidt 6mo ago
  The details of lexical scope where defined in Algol 60 (1960), nearly 2 decades before Rabbit (1978). People did know how to implement things back then, and TeX is a great example of that. It is just our definitions have changed over the years of what we consider better.
  - noelwelsh 5mo ago
    Rabbit was closure conversion, which was efficient implementation of first-class functions with lexical scope. The abstract discusses the difference with ALGOL: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6913 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6913
magnio 6mo ago
You want Typst: https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst It's like the JSX of Latex: markup in a programming language, not a programming language pretends to be markup.
- DoctorOW 6mo ago
  > I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable. I guess that is the difference between an ad hoc macro system and an actually thought through programming language. > The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. That is, however, counteracted by being able to do things on your own, without immersing yourself deeply in LaTeX for years. Also, it will improve with time.
esafak 6mo ago
Is Typst appropriate for web apps; e.g., the input forms here?
- noelwelsh 6mo ago
  Nope. Typst's primary output is PDF, and it is a stand-alone binary. It's a replacement for most uses of LaTeX to produce documents. It is not a replacement for this project, which focuses only on rendering LaTeX math code and can be embedded in multiple different runtimes.
bee_rider 6mo ago
I like LaTeX for the most part (I have had to use some weird hacks but usually once they are done they are stuck in a macro and turned ignorable). But I think the main things it has going for it are that it: produces nice output, and all the journals accept it. Does there exist a tool that renders Typist to LaTeX? That could play nicely with the existing ecosystem.
- echoangle 6mo ago
  Pandoc can convert LaTeX to Typst and back but probably only for simple snippets without any obscure packages. It’s not lossless.
LoganDark 6mo ago
I hope Typst eventually gets some equivalent to tkz-euclide, as I've never seen anything even remotely comparable.
banboosy 6mo ago
[dead]
huijzer 6mo ago
I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis
- auggierose 6mo ago
  How about adding a PDF release ;-)
- quantummagic 6mo ago
  Didn't see a pdf of your thesis, except on your web-site[1]. But the version there (at least as it renders on my machine), has numerous formatting issues. For one egregious example, look at the letter spacing in the title and legend of Figure 2.2 (page 27): "civilia ns", "Pe rs ona lity s core". I'm sure the content is great, but using it as an example of Typst prowess, seems ill-advised. [1] https://huijzer.xyz/files/f72fa09561f20162.pdf https://huijzer.xyz/files/f72fa09561f20162.pdf
  - ForceBru 6mo ago
    I don't see any issues with the title of Figure 2.2, but the legend and the x-axis label have weird letter spacing indeed. It seems like images like this are standalone (https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis/blob/main/images/personality-density-ci-first.svg https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis/blob/main/images/pe...) and probably aren't generated by Typst. So perhaps the weird spacing is not Typst's fault.
    - bscphil 6mo ago
      Looks like the SVG was converted from an EPS file, and the resulting SVG contains individual glyph positions (advances) for the characters in "Personality score", but it doesn't specify a valid font, probably because the font name was mangled in the original EPS file (which is pretty typical). So whether the resulting file looks right depends on whether the rendering engine chooses the correct font. Looks like it's supposed to be Nimbus Sans or something metric compatible with that, but the serif font chosen by Typst looks obviously wrong.
ngriffiths 6mo ago
It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald-knuth-typesetting-with-boxes-and-glue/ http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381 In particular it's interesting how people seem to think TeX itself is actually quite nice to use but its popularity and LaTeX packages created a huge mess of a system.
- forlorn_mammoth 6mo ago
  part of the challenge is the inherent irreducible complexity of the domain. "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. another part is many people built their own solution to their own corner of this domain, and not all of them had the deep appreciation for how the rest of the TeX system works. I hear similar complaints about "Make web page look good", which is popular but also a huge mess of a system.
  - dnautics 6mo ago
    > "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. Even just a sane layout renderer is incredibly hard. A decade ago I wrote a bespoke DNA sequence typesetter (in svg) and I had claude build an extension, for whatever reason it chose to build it from scratch instead of using the components I had built, and it did everything wrong.
- ajkjk 6mo ago
  Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around. Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad, and the technology tends to be lagging behind the bleeding edge in many subfields anyway so TeX doesn't even necessarily stand out.
troyvit 6mo ago
Huh. My special lady friend is in the process of finishing up her thesis using LaTeX after ditching LibreOffice. It was nightmare for some of the same reasons: bad UX, bad portability and crippling bugs. There was a ramping up period, and she had an out of date GitHub repo to help her, but she is incredibly happy that she switched. Collaboration could be smoother I guess.
wmkn 6mo ago
Yups, I love the idea of LaTeX, LaTeX itself not so much.
xienze 6mo ago
> The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. This seems like the _perfect_ use for an LLM: systematically porting over as much of the "ecosystem" to Typst as possible. Is anyone doing that?
- luz666 6mo ago
  Two hours ago a coworker told me that he let an llm port his latex template to typst. According to him, it was perfect.
abdullahkhalids 6mo ago
Latex is used because writing math in latex is very good, and despite how everything else (like tables and figures) is so bad. That's why people take the math subset of latex and use it in other contexts - exactly like this product.
- davrosthedalek 6mo ago
  I agree that tables are not great, but figures? Seems to work pretty well, better than word for sure.
  - necovek 6mo ago
    I still find it easier to align tables with numbers in TeX on the decimal point than in anything else. How is this even achieved with HTML or Word? Eg. variable width numbers like 4.53 13.98765 7 -1,000,234.76 Not perfect in TeX either, but at least possible.
    - zepolen 6mo ago
      The irony of your comment...
      - necovek 6mo ago
        If you are not referring to the use of exaggerated examples to more clearly show the point, I wonder what do you refer to?
    - electroly 6mo ago
      In Word you add a decimal tab stop to the ruler. Word's main problem is that people are unaware of its features; they don't spend time learning it like they do with TeX. https://imgur.com/jipZ90B https://imgur.com/jipZ90B
      - necovek 5mo ago
        Thanks, yeah, I haven't heard of it before even though it seems to have existed forever. To your point, I guess that is an issue with WYSIWYG tools: if not discoverable, you assume it is not there.
CJefferson 6mo ago
Not a latex post with someone talking about typst. Come back when the html output works. Not having good accessible output was more acceptable back when Tex was invented, it definitely isn’t now, and they made a new system and somehow got this worse then modern latex.
- savq 6mo ago
  Typst does have have accessibility features.[1] I don't worry too much about HTML output still being WIP. Even if TeX had a massive head start, Typst has a good development speed, and a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. [1]: https://typst.app/docs/guides/accessibility/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/accessibility/
scuppernong 6mo ago
as long as the arXiv doesn't accept Typst, it's never going to be a real alternative to LaTeX. and the arXiv maintainers seem either hostile or indifferent to Typst
- tcfhgj 6mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZlAbCOjd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZlAbCOjd8 doesn't appear indifferent or hostile
  - alterom 6mo ago
    TL;DW: there is interest in supporting Typst, but there are roadblocks: * Higher priority work currently being done on ArXiV (moving from Perl to Python/cloud) * No "standard" Typst distro * Support team needs to be re-trained for a new language * Persistency: TeX has 30+ years of history; will Typst be around in 30 years? Will current code compile? Will existing documents be supported?
  - scuppernong 6mo ago
    haven't watched it but my only data point for that claim is this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1dcu3p8/i_contacted_arxiv_to_ask_them_if_they_could_add/ https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1dcu3p8/i_contacted_...
sombragris 6mo ago
Not necessarily my experience. I wrote (and I am writing) several academic documents with it. There are its quirks, of course, but with good classes such as memoir, I don't feel the need to do a lot more than basic customization in the preamble. Still is a good tool for me.
- eddieh 6mo ago
  For me the memoir class made LaTeX worse. The titlesec package is more customizable, easier to use, and reduced the size of the preamble significantly.
  - sombragris 6mo ago
    That's if you need to customize headings. I usually can keep using the standard ones, so that's not my case, and I suspect this also applies to a lot of people.
    - eddieh 5mo ago
      Customizing chapter styles, page styles, and headings was my sole reason for using the memoir class. I'm probably in the minority, that's true.
adamnemecek 6mo ago
+1 for Typst being amazing. I can actually like write my own functions when I need to. I don't think I have ever written a LaTeX macro without having to look up a lot of stuff.
_blk 6mo ago
Agree. Love latex and LLMs made it a lot more accessible but DX wise it's still a huge hassle, esp when it feels that it's easier to just generate HTML and PDF it from there.. I mean the best workflow is probably to write markdown, take a site you like, pick a color scheme and have Claude do the transformation along with a script to make it repeatable
whyenot 6mo ago
I have been (and still am, I guess) a big LaTeX fan. I wrote a flora in LaTeX, with the idea that it would be a "living document" that I could update easily. That was a mistake. LaTeX really is very brittle. My flora no longer makes it through typesetting without erroring out, and trying to figure out what is going wrong takes so much time (not the first time I have had to deal with this). My idealism got ahead of practicality. Looking back, I should have used Word and InDesign; that combo would have prevented so many headaches and been more stable.
contingencies 6mo ago
Meh. For cross-platform, low hassle, just use LyX + XeTeX + decent fonts. Once you learn how to do the commonly annoying things (alignment; indices; pages without footers; custom footers; etc. - AI is good), you can achieve all of them. You will positively loathe using conventional word processing after a short while. https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
- a96 5mo ago
  Oh, wow, there's a new LyX release! It's been almost 30 years since I used it and it's still going.

mcookly 6mo ago

I agree re. LaTeX. I've tried Typst for some complex projects, and it's just not quite there yet. ConTeXt on the other hand ... chef's kiss.

krater23 6mo ago

I know exactly what you mean, and that paired with a community that is absolutely sure that they know exactly how things need to be done and everyone that wants it in another way is dumb.

noelwelsh 6mo ago

This mirrors my experience. It's worth noting that TeX was developed in the same time period that the details of lexical scope were being nailed down by Guy Steele in the Rabbit compiler for Scheme. It's not that TeX is an ad hoc system; it's more the case that people didn't actually know how to implement a better system at the time.

groos 6mo ago
'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.
- tialaramex 6mo ago
  That's true. Do you know who else won a Turing Award? Tony Hoare. What is Tony famous for? Well, lots of things, including his very important comparison sort algorithm Quicksort, but, in this context how about the Billion Dollar Mistake ? That's a pretty nasty booboo in many programming languages for which Tony blames himself because it was his idea. Like your parent said, TeX shipped a long time ago and we learned a lot since then, it is not a surprise that we know how to do better today, in fact it would be a serious black mark for Computer Science if we couldn't.
- drob518 6mo ago
  Which means what, exactly.
amszmidt 6mo ago
The details of lexical scope where defined in Algol 60 (1960), nearly 2 decades before Rabbit (1978). People did know how to implement things back then, and TeX is a great example of that. It is just our definitions have changed over the years of what we consider better.
- noelwelsh 5mo ago
  Rabbit was closure conversion, which was efficient implementation of first-class functions with lexical scope. The abstract discusses the difference with ALGOL: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6913 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6913

magnio 6mo ago

You want Typst: https://github.com/typst/typst https://github.com/typst/typst It's like the JSX of Latex: markup in a programming language, not a programming language pretends to be markup.

DoctorOW 6mo ago
> I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable. I guess that is the difference between an ad hoc macro system and an actually thought through programming language. > The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. That is, however, counteracted by being able to do things on your own, without immersing yourself deeply in LaTeX for years. Also, it will improve with time.

esafak 6mo ago

Is Typst appropriate for web apps; e.g., the input forms here?

noelwelsh 6mo ago
Nope. Typst's primary output is PDF, and it is a stand-alone binary. It's a replacement for most uses of LaTeX to produce documents. It is not a replacement for this project, which focuses only on rendering LaTeX math code and can be embedded in multiple different runtimes.

bee_rider 6mo ago

I like LaTeX for the most part (I have had to use some weird hacks but usually once they are done they are stuck in a macro and turned ignorable). But I think the main things it has going for it are that it: produces nice output, and all the journals accept it. Does there exist a tool that renders Typist to LaTeX? That could play nicely with the existing ecosystem.

echoangle 6mo ago
Pandoc can convert LaTeX to Typst and back but probably only for simple snippets without any obscure packages. It’s not lossless.

LoganDark 6mo ago

I hope Typst eventually gets some equivalent to tkz-euclide, as I've never seen anything even remotely comparable.

banboosy 6mo ago

[dead]

huijzer 6mo ago

I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis

auggierose 6mo ago
How about adding a PDF release ;-)
quantummagic 6mo ago
Didn't see a pdf of your thesis, except on your web-site[1]. But the version there (at least as it renders on my machine), has numerous formatting issues. For one egregious example, look at the letter spacing in the title and legend of Figure 2.2 (page 27): "civilia ns", "Pe rs ona lity s core". I'm sure the content is great, but using it as an example of Typst prowess, seems ill-advised. [1] https://huijzer.xyz/files/f72fa09561f20162.pdf https://huijzer.xyz/files/f72fa09561f20162.pdf
- ForceBru 6mo ago
  I don't see any issues with the title of Figure 2.2, but the legend and the x-axis label have weird letter spacing indeed. It seems like images like this are standalone (https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis/blob/main/images/personality-density-ci-first.svg https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis/blob/main/images/pe...) and probably aren't generated by Typst. So perhaps the weird spacing is not Typst's fault.
  - bscphil 6mo ago
    Looks like the SVG was converted from an EPS file, and the resulting SVG contains individual glyph positions (advances) for the characters in "Personality score", but it doesn't specify a valid font, probably because the font name was mangled in the original EPS file (which is pretty typical). So whether the resulting file looks right depends on whether the rendering engine chooses the correct font. Looks like it's supposed to be Nimbus Sans or something metric compatible with that, but the serif font chosen by Typst looks obviously wrong.

ngriffiths 6mo ago

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald-knuth-typesetting-with-boxes-and-glue/ http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381 In particular it's interesting how people seem to think TeX itself is actually quite nice to use but its popularity and LaTeX packages created a huge mess of a system.

forlorn_mammoth 6mo ago
part of the challenge is the inherent irreducible complexity of the domain. "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. another part is many people built their own solution to their own corner of this domain, and not all of them had the deep appreciation for how the rest of the TeX system works. I hear similar complaints about "Make web page look good", which is popular but also a huge mess of a system.
- dnautics 6mo ago
  > "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. Even just a sane layout renderer is incredibly hard. A decade ago I wrote a bespoke DNA sequence typesetter (in svg) and I had claude build an extension, for whatever reason it chose to build it from scratch instead of using the components I had built, and it did everything wrong.
ajkjk 6mo ago
Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around. Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad, and the technology tends to be lagging behind the bleeding edge in many subfields anyway so TeX doesn't even necessarily stand out.

troyvit 6mo ago

Huh. My special lady friend is in the process of finishing up her thesis using LaTeX after ditching LibreOffice. It was nightmare for some of the same reasons: bad UX, bad portability and crippling bugs. There was a ramping up period, and she had an out of date GitHub repo to help her, but she is incredibly happy that she switched. Collaboration could be smoother I guess.

wmkn 6mo ago

Yups, I love the idea of LaTeX, LaTeX itself not so much.

xienze 6mo ago

> The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. This seems like the _perfect_ use for an LLM: systematically porting over as much of the "ecosystem" to Typst as possible. Is anyone doing that?

luz666 6mo ago
Two hours ago a coworker told me that he let an llm port his latex template to typst. According to him, it was perfect.

abdullahkhalids 6mo ago

Latex is used because writing math in latex is very good, and despite how everything else (like tables and figures) is so bad. That's why people take the math subset of latex and use it in other contexts - exactly like this product.

davrosthedalek 6mo ago
I agree that tables are not great, but figures? Seems to work pretty well, better than word for sure.
- necovek 6mo ago
  I still find it easier to align tables with numbers in TeX on the decimal point than in anything else. How is this even achieved with HTML or Word? Eg. variable width numbers like 4.53 13.98765 7 -1,000,234.76 Not perfect in TeX either, but at least possible.
  - zepolen 6mo ago
    The irony of your comment...
    - necovek 6mo ago
      If you are not referring to the use of exaggerated examples to more clearly show the point, I wonder what do you refer to?
  - electroly 6mo ago
    In Word you add a decimal tab stop to the ruler. Word's main problem is that people are unaware of its features; they don't spend time learning it like they do with TeX. https://imgur.com/jipZ90B https://imgur.com/jipZ90B
    - necovek 5mo ago
      Thanks, yeah, I haven't heard of it before even though it seems to have existed forever. To your point, I guess that is an issue with WYSIWYG tools: if not discoverable, you assume it is not there.

CJefferson 6mo ago

Not a latex post with someone talking about typst. Come back when the html output works. Not having good accessible output was more acceptable back when Tex was invented, it definitely isn’t now, and they made a new system and somehow got this worse then modern latex.

savq 6mo ago
Typst does have have accessibility features.[1] I don't worry too much about HTML output still being WIP. Even if TeX had a massive head start, Typst has a good development speed, and a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. [1]: https://typst.app/docs/guides/accessibility/ https://typst.app/docs/guides/accessibility/

scuppernong 6mo ago

as long as the arXiv doesn't accept Typst, it's never going to be a real alternative to LaTeX. and the arXiv maintainers seem either hostile or indifferent to Typst

tcfhgj 6mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZlAbCOjd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZlAbCOjd8 doesn't appear indifferent or hostile
- alterom 6mo ago
  TL;DW: there is interest in supporting Typst, but there are roadblocks: * Higher priority work currently being done on ArXiV (moving from Perl to Python/cloud) * No "standard" Typst distro * Support team needs to be re-trained for a new language * Persistency: TeX has 30+ years of history; will Typst be around in 30 years? Will current code compile? Will existing documents be supported?
- scuppernong 6mo ago
  haven't watched it but my only data point for that claim is this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1dcu3p8/i_contacted_arxiv_to_ask_them_if_they_could_add/ https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1dcu3p8/i_contacted_...

sombragris 6mo ago

Not necessarily my experience. I wrote (and I am writing) several academic documents with it. There are its quirks, of course, but with good classes such as memoir, I don't feel the need to do a lot more than basic customization in the preamble. Still is a good tool for me.

eddieh 6mo ago
For me the memoir class made LaTeX worse. The titlesec package is more customizable, easier to use, and reduced the size of the preamble significantly.
- sombragris 6mo ago
  That's if you need to customize headings. I usually can keep using the standard ones, so that's not my case, and I suspect this also applies to a lot of people.
  - eddieh 5mo ago
    Customizing chapter styles, page styles, and headings was my sole reason for using the memoir class. I'm probably in the minority, that's true.

adamnemecek 6mo ago

+1 for Typst being amazing. I can actually like write my own functions when I need to. I don't think I have ever written a LaTeX macro without having to look up a lot of stuff.

_blk 6mo ago

Agree. Love latex and LLMs made it a lot more accessible but DX wise it's still a huge hassle, esp when it feels that it's easier to just generate HTML and PDF it from there.. I mean the best workflow is probably to write markdown, take a site you like, pick a color scheme and have Claude do the transformation along with a script to make it repeatable

whyenot 6mo ago

I have been (and still am, I guess) a big LaTeX fan. I wrote a flora in LaTeX, with the idea that it would be a "living document" that I could update easily. That was a mistake. LaTeX really is very brittle. My flora no longer makes it through typesetting without erroring out, and trying to figure out what is going wrong takes so much time (not the first time I have had to deal with this). My idealism got ahead of practicality. Looking back, I should have used Word and InDesign; that combo would have prevented so many headaches and been more stable.

contingencies 6mo ago

Meh. For cross-platform, low hassle, just use LyX + XeTeX + decent fonts. Once you learn how to do the commonly annoying things (alignment; indices; pages without footers; custom footers; etc. - AI is good), you can achieve all of them. You will positively loathe using conventional word processing after a short while. https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/

a96 5mo ago
Oh, wow, there's a new LyX release! It's been almost 30 years since I used it and it's still going.