4 ms·

Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Academic papers and books, novels, thousands of ebooks, have bee

Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Academic papers and books, novels, thousands of ebooks, have been written in single file markdowns for 15 years. Writing directly in typst is good for small things with intense typesetting like ... wedding invitations, advertisements. But it doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers. Writing is not typesetting. All the forms need for the composition of all civilized text were present in word perfect 5.1, which unlike Word, Latex and Typst, permitted no typsetting during the process of writing. They were all recovered in the writers' markdowns nearly two decades ago.

Certhas 4mo ago
So LaTeX also doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers?
- applicative 4mo ago
  If they need to do typsetting, as mathematicians in fact do. Mathematics breaks the civilized opposition of content and format, because it involves the invention of symbols on the fly. Reasoning about this is actually quite simple but the typst brigaders have no experience with the history of the topic. It is universal that the flood of largely automated hackernews typst brigaders cannot make a single post without flatly lying about every other existing instrument. On this site I have never read a single true statement by a typst brigader about latex or markdown, but I have read literally /hundreds/ of lies. If these accounts are real and not bots, the community is fated to die, unfortunately. I use typst countless times a day, but don't need to lie.
cycomanic 4mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean. Markdown compared to typst or latex is extremely limited and using it for books or academic papers is very niche. I certainly would (and have for all my previous publications) prefer typst or latex over markdown. I also don't understand your point about not permitting typesetting during writing. Latex and text are the prime examples of separating writing from typesetting.
- applicative 4mo ago
  It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers of all sorts have been principal participants of the lists for almost two decades. I would rather use microsoft word than write in raw typst, which is no different from trying to think in raw latex - even if in some fields it is necessary. I certainly cannot write unless I can output to docx. A hundred things would be completely impossible to me without a 'lifeless' text format like markdown. The inclusion of a turing complete programming language into document composition - the principal labor distinctive of advanced civilization - is obviously pure insanity, even if it is necessary in the mathematical case. What one needs are ways of introducing the exact features that e.g. wordperfect 5.1 had already completely perfected: paragraphing, sectioning, noting, emphasizing, citing, etc. These are the internal semantic features of actual expression of actual thought, things that must be preserved e.g. by a translator - as sexy typesetting need not be. Considier the question: What is that which must be preserved by a translator? It is the question: What is thought? If I am typing typsetting commands not relevant to this, I am not writing, I am not thinking, I am not constructing a reasoned argument: I am doing high quality page-scale finger painting. For example, I now consider it intellectual malpractice to give advanced students a translated text for close study, without also supplying the original in parallel. I can do this by simply zipping two markdown files together header to header, paragraph to paragraph with a simple script making html - the original in, say, smaller type narrower column at left margin. The translation can be changed or an alternative constructed or a new one produced automatically by one of the translation devices. This is an operation that is basically impossible with genuine typesetting, though each md file compiles to pdf e.g. via typst after a markdown->typst process. This is quite as impossible in typst as it is in latex - huge projects have been devoted to it in latex with complete failure - the necessity of pagination introduces the necessity of precise knowledge of both languages if the page break happens ... in medias sentence - such people e.g. the Loeb library used to have. With html it's a complete picnic, a literal zip operation with a markdown reader -- but of course isn't proper typsetting. The merit is that html is unpaginated. The file for each language itself makes a perfectly sound typst pdf with a keystroke.
josephg 4mo ago
> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Huh? I roll to doubt. How do you do this stuff with markdown? I tried for ages but only got half-baked hacky "markdown extensions" which weren't even commonmark compliant. I've found nothing even remotely as powerful as typst in the markdown world.
- applicative 4mo ago
  I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.
  - _flux 4mo ago
    Typst html support is already available as an experimental feature, so e.g. EPUB probably isn't too much work in addition to that (as I understand it, it's basically zipped HTML with some metadata). It's also in the roadmap: https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export . If the translator has access to a service like typst.app, then I don't see too many obstacles for translating. But I don't have any experience on doing translations.
    - applicative 4mo ago
      Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.
      - _flux 4mo ago
        Perhaps you would enjoy the rest of the tooling, that may be useful in scientific contexts or in books discussing programming languages. Or perhaps you would also want to publish in PDF, like for an actual print book. What kind of issues did you expect to encounter in translating Typst documents to other languages?
  - 4mo ago

Certhas 4mo ago

So LaTeX also doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers?

applicative 4mo ago
If they need to do typsetting, as mathematicians in fact do. Mathematics breaks the civilized opposition of content and format, because it involves the invention of symbols on the fly. Reasoning about this is actually quite simple but the typst brigaders have no experience with the history of the topic. It is universal that the flood of largely automated hackernews typst brigaders cannot make a single post without flatly lying about every other existing instrument. On this site I have never read a single true statement by a typst brigader about latex or markdown, but I have read literally /hundreds/ of lies. If these accounts are real and not bots, the community is fated to die, unfortunately. I use typst countless times a day, but don't need to lie.

cycomanic 4mo ago

I'm not sure what you mean. Markdown compared to typst or latex is extremely limited and using it for books or academic papers is very niche. I certainly would (and have for all my previous publications) prefer typst or latex over markdown. I also don't understand your point about not permitting typesetting during writing. Latex and text are the prime examples of separating writing from typesetting.

applicative 4mo ago
It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers of all sorts have been principal participants of the lists for almost two decades. I would rather use microsoft word than write in raw typst, which is no different from trying to think in raw latex - even if in some fields it is necessary. I certainly cannot write unless I can output to docx. A hundred things would be completely impossible to me without a 'lifeless' text format like markdown. The inclusion of a turing complete programming language into document composition - the principal labor distinctive of advanced civilization - is obviously pure insanity, even if it is necessary in the mathematical case. What one needs are ways of introducing the exact features that e.g. wordperfect 5.1 had already completely perfected: paragraphing, sectioning, noting, emphasizing, citing, etc. These are the internal semantic features of actual expression of actual thought, things that must be preserved e.g. by a translator - as sexy typesetting need not be. Considier the question: What is that which must be preserved by a translator? It is the question: What is thought? If I am typing typsetting commands not relevant to this, I am not writing, I am not thinking, I am not constructing a reasoned argument: I am doing high quality page-scale finger painting. For example, I now consider it intellectual malpractice to give advanced students a translated text for close study, without also supplying the original in parallel. I can do this by simply zipping two markdown files together header to header, paragraph to paragraph with a simple script making html - the original in, say, smaller type narrower column at left margin. The translation can be changed or an alternative constructed or a new one produced automatically by one of the translation devices. This is an operation that is basically impossible with genuine typesetting, though each md file compiles to pdf e.g. via typst after a markdown->typst process. This is quite as impossible in typst as it is in latex - huge projects have been devoted to it in latex with complete failure - the necessity of pagination introduces the necessity of precise knowledge of both languages if the page break happens ... in medias sentence - such people e.g. the Loeb library used to have. With html it's a complete picnic, a literal zip operation with a markdown reader -- but of course isn't proper typsetting. The merit is that html is unpaginated. The file for each language itself makes a perfectly sound typst pdf with a keystroke.

josephg 4mo ago

> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Huh? I roll to doubt. How do you do this stuff with markdown? I tried for ages but only got half-baked hacky "markdown extensions" which weren't even commonmark compliant. I've found nothing even remotely as powerful as typst in the markdown world.

applicative 4mo ago
I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.
- _flux 4mo ago
  Typst html support is already available as an experimental feature, so e.g. EPUB probably isn't too much work in addition to that (as I understand it, it's basically zipped HTML with some metadata). It's also in the roadmap: https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export . If the translator has access to a service like typst.app, then I don't see too many obstacles for translating. But I don't have any experience on doing translations.
  - applicative 4mo ago
    Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.
    - _flux 4mo ago
      Perhaps you would enjoy the rest of the tooling, that may be useful in scientific contexts or in books discussing programming languages. Or perhaps you would also want to publish in PDF, like for an actual print book. What kind of issues did you expect to encounter in translating Typst documents to other languages?
- 4mo ago