I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

https://fransskarman.com/phd_thesis_in_typst.html

by todsacerdoti • 1 year ago

532 328 1 year ago

rossant• 1 year ago

Great work. Screenshots would be nice.

Svoka• 1 year 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-Khwarizmi2• 1 year 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.

JadeNB2• 1 year 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.

JadeNB2• 1 year 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.

andrepd3• 1 year 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.

commandersaki2• 1 year 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-fleek7• 1 year 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)

WhyNotHugo• 1 year 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• 1 year 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_• 1 year ago

My makefiles ran it 4 times, i think. I still preferred it to Word.

SkiFire13• 1 year 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.

a5c114• 1 year ago

Last time I checked, flipping a coin twice gave different results.

Diti• 1 year ago

Aren’t getting different results the norm in programming anyway? Developers usually don’t make the effort to include idempotency and make builds reproducible.

almostgotcaught2• 1 year ago

Almost every compiler is a multipass compiler.

someuser2345• 1 year ago

That's not the definition of insanity, that's the definition of practicing.

pcfwik• 1 year ago

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy to gitignore.

https://mgeier.github.io/latexmk.html#running-latexmk

nextos4• 1 year ago

LaTeX needs several passes to compile because it was designed with minicomputers of the 80s in mind, i.e. tiny memory constraints.

Latexmk is one way to address this problem. A good IDE like AUCTeX can also figure out how many times the compiler should be invoked.

Good IDEs will also provide other invaluable assistance, like SyncTeX (jumping from source to exact point at PDF, and back).

jeffparsons3• 1 year ago

I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago:

    if [ -z "$(find . -name "*.bib" -print0)" ]; then
        # Just two runs, to cover TOC building, etc.
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    else
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        bibtex "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    fi

So I guess if you're using bibtex, then you need to run it three times, but otherwise only twice?

This is to say... I'm glad those days are gone.

mr_mitm4• 1 year ago

There can still be cases where a fourth run is necessary, theoretically a fifth run. There are even cases where you get into an infinite loop, for example if you use the vref package. It will "cleverly" replace references to things like "figure 3 on the next page" or "figure 3 on page 8". When the reference is expanded, it might cause the figure to move to the following page, which means the reference is then contracted to "on page 8", which means the figure moves back to the original place again, in which case the reference must be updated, and so on ...

LaTeX will usually tell you by including a warning in the output ("LaTeX Warning: Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to get cross-references right."), which no one reads, because it is so verbose. Not having that warning is not a guarantee that it's now stable either, so our Makefile actually compares the PDF files minus variable bytes like timestamps to know whether the build converged.

Evidlo• 1 year ago

Just use Tectonic nowadays for compiling LaTeX source. It automatically handles these cases of compiling multiple times.

Tmpod• 1 year ago

+1 for tectonic, it's miles better than the alternatives for every single case, in my experience. Development seems to have slowed down lately, which is a shame.

Aurornis• 1 year ago

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 always feel like I’m doing something wrong when I have to deal with LaTeX and lose hours to fighting with the tooling. Even with a clean install on a new machine it feels like something fails to work.

The last time I had to change a document I had to go through what felt like 100 different search results of people with the same issue before I found one where there was a resolution and it was completely obscure. I tried to help out by reposting the answer to a couple other locations, but I was so exhausted that I swore off LaTeX for any future work unless absolutely unavoidable.

da_chicken• 1 year ago

I still dislike the idea that my document formatting and layout system really needs a build environment. Because let's be real, almost nobody actually needs it for genuine typesetting. I think the problem with LaTeX is that it's too flexible.

It reminds me a little bit of the problem of Linux distributions. Linux is supposed to be a system with the bazaar model instead of the cathedral model. Except what you actually end up with is that each distribution becomes it's own cathedral, because building a whole system now requires major decisions to be made. LaTeX class files feel like the same thing.

jll29• 1 year ago

Many people use LaTeX via Overleaf (a Website, cf. https://overleaf.com ) rather than installing it locally.

That also solves the problem of having to install locally vairous extension packages or fonts - all is already there, and after writing a paper you may submit it directly to some conferences or journals from that Web GUI instead of having to email it or upload to a third site.

veunes5• 1 year ago

One of the things that really interests me about Typst is that the compile process seems much more deterministic and modern

_Algernon_3• 1 year ago

Why didn't you use latexmk? It deals with the recompiling for you.

jonathanstrange3• 1 year ago

What do you mean by tooling? I've used LaTeX for decades to write books and papers and the combination with Emacs was flawless. The only major change for me was the transition from Bibtex to Biblatex.

TimorousBestie4• 1 year 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• 1 year 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/

andrepd3• 1 year 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 :)

wenc2• 1 year 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.

TimorousBestie4• 1 year 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.

ykonstant7• 1 year ago

I don't know about Claude, but when it comes to LaTeX IDE, I will always recommend TeXStudio over everything else. It handles all the annoying problems of LaTeX setup and compilation, and it provides a discoverable interface with classic-style menus (words, it has words instead of inexplicable little icons!) for various common tasks.

I say that as someone who uses a tricked-out Vim for my own LaTeX workflow, and VS Code for several programming languages.

kzrdude3• 1 year ago

One relatively optimistic prediction would be that a few will accept Typst, but latex export from Typst will gradually get more mature, until we end up with a charade where more people use other frontends like Quarto or Typst that output to latex rather than latex themselves for submission into journals - in certain fields. Somewhere after that time, Typst will break through and be generally accepted itself.

PatronBernard• 1 year ago

I hate a lot of things about LaTeX (also wrote several theses in it, as well as research articles), but the math syntax definitely wasn't one of them. Why on earth would they change it?

gsinclair• 1 year ago

I think anything that is chock full of backslashes and braces can surely be improved upon.

tiagod• 1 year 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.

lblume6• 1 year 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_dev2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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

dkga3• 1 year 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_dev2• 1 year 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.

andrepd3• 1 year ago

Jesus

octernion2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Interesting! Did you use a tool to do the conversion automatically? How did it pick up on custom packages and styling?

octernion2• 1 year 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

shermantanktop5• 1 year 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.

nailer• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

xigoi6• 1 year ago

Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.

Accessibility is just as important as “the real work”.

thomasfedb• 1 year ago

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.

wenc2• 1 year ago

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

pdpi• 1 year ago

If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look plain good.

TimorousBestie4• 1 year ago

Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.

api• 1 year ago

Given that LLMs can or soon will be able to turn markdown or word into LaTeX this filter won’t last long.

It’s a dumb filter anyway.

senkora• 1 year ago

There’s always the WordTex template if you want to create documents that look like LaTeX output from within Word: https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8

Waterluvian• 1 year ago

I did this once in undergrad. Used Word to make my term paper two columns and all formatted like a journal article. Felt cool. Felt legitimate. But I then felt kinda embarrassed and never really shared it with anyone.

B1FF_PSUVM• 1 year ago

If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

Sez you. MS Word 4.0 for Mac was perfectly alright, putting in less elbow grease than fiddling with LaTex.

And you could get a PDF out of it, via the PostScript print driver.

Never liked those spindly CM Tex fonts, anyway.

agnishom3• 1 year ago

If you write equations in Word Equation Editor

The experience is also awful. It's much better to write \in or \frac{}{} rather than to go to a dropdown menu and figure out which button to click.

int_19h• 1 year ago

I remember when I submitted a paper written in LaTeX to my math prof in college, alone in the class (nobody even mentioned it to us so it wasn't exactly surprising, but I was one of those guys running Gentoo as their desktop back then so...).

She not only instantly recognized it, but, judging by the look and the platitudes she gave me on the spot, it probably earned me an extra point on the overall grade.

When in Rome...

nextos4• 1 year ago

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.

Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

__float• 1 year ago

What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.

catgary2• 1 year ago

I’m going to have to disagree with you there. The compile times are long, the error messages are worse than useless, and tikz diagrams are almost always unreadable messes.

Large swathes of mathematics, computer science, and physics involve notations and diagrams that are genuinely hard to typeset, and incredibly repetitive and hard to read if you don’t make heavy use of the macro system. Integrating some actual programming features could be a game changer.

Paapaa7• 1 year ago

Typst does already support some microtype fetures out of the box and more are coming: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6161

I'd also not overemphasize the significance of microtype features. They might help with narrow columns but on wider columnds the difference is very small and most people will never notice them at all.

wyager• 1 year ago

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste.

Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.

shermantanktop5• 1 year ago

I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. Probably. It’s the sort of ritual humiliation that academia specializes in.

blindstitch• 1 year ago

The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.

unbelievr• 1 year ago

Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other interested parties and they're all given the book.

Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc. So you really, really want it to look right at the first go.

There's been some progress the past few years now where you get to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.

yencabulator• 1 year ago

WYSIWYG means what you're editing looks like the end result; LaTex and Typst are at the opposite end of the scale, being languages that compile into layout. No, a preview window does not count as WYSIWYG.

shermantanktop5• 1 year ago

This answer makes sense to me, because it is rooted in a functional need - the need to have a printing house consume the results successfully.

Some other comments are oriented around aesthetics ("taste") or the state of other tools (Word, etc.) which I understand but those issues are more personal.

porcoda• 1 year ago

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros.

I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.

generationP2• 1 year ago

Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed theorems or fancy headings.

RheingoldRiver• 1 year ago

I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.)

And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)

duped• 1 year ago

On a total tangent, I found out that my grandfather's university digitized their entire library a few years ago including his masters' thesis from 1948. Back then it was written with a typewriter and by hand for everything else.

I bet he could have done something more advanced if he had modern computers, but looking at it 75 years later and seeing his handwriting on the page was moving more than the content itself.

generationP2• 1 year ago

I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they illuminated their manuscripts.

efitz• 1 year ago

I have often thought that LaTEX' distinctive font and formatting is either a virtue signal or an in-group signal.

thesuperbigfrog2• 1 year ago

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX.

Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful.

Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.

jwr• 1 year ago

Donald Knuth. Please.

rrgok• 1 year ago

It seems the grammar of the language was an after thought... It amazes me that he spent so much time perfecting the laying out algorithms that he could not come up with a sane language.

roshdodd• 1 year ago

A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git.

Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually.

As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

gwervc• 1 year ago

The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

I'm still sour about the 3 days it took me to have something usable for my thesis, and I was starting from an existing template. And it's still not exactly how I want it to be; I gave up on addressing a bug in the reference list.

vkazanov• 1 year ago

I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes.

In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever.

Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or working with an acceptable editor also helps.

cycomanic• 1 year ago

From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily.

Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.

yusina• 1 year ago

Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks,

I theory, yes. And that's also what I'm usually trying to do.

What I have observed though with Latex folks is that they type 3 words and then look at the preview or re-compile to see if it looks good.

nxpnsv2• 1 year ago

Well during 5 years of undergrad reports and papers, then 5 years of PhD thesis papers, you do tend to hoard some useful snippets, it is more of a byproduct than a fixation... at least for me.

__m• 1 year ago

It's like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.

jeffparsons3• 1 year ago

Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad), and then back into a brand new Word document.

This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for the nerves.

Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into LaTeX's trap. :)

berti• 1 year ago

I’ve run into this exact issue several times with group projects at university in the 2010s, and each time recovery was copying chunks of plain text from backup copies into new documents as you say. Luckily by the time we got to the final year capstone project the whole group was happy to go with LaTeX. Not sure if these Word issues have even been fixed since.

oefrha• 1 year ago

Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results (however minor). Actual research doesn’t. It’s the classic feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly productive activities like typesetting.

I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.

blitzar2• 1 year ago

Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting?

I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.

xigoi6• 1 year ago

Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting?

Because its target userbase is people who don’t give a single shit about typography.

eunos• 1 year ago

When I was in college I found out that I have better reading experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer to read Springer published reference books rather than class recommended books.

_Algernon_3• 1 year ago

For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly.

Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better.

And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).

electroly• 1 year ago

In Word, set the paragraph alignment to justified and enable automatic hyphenation.

You can actually use LaTeX math notation in the equation editor in modern Word.

diffeomorphism4• 1 year ago

This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint, note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc..

Obvious reasons:

- Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you want it to look good.

- You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine.

- Spending time on tooling feels productive even if it is not past a certain point.

- People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend time on it.

That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different journal templates, so the less custom code the better.

whatever1• 1 year ago

I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors.

But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.

stared• 1 year ago

First, you have to (or at least - you had to). I mean, it was the only way to sanely include a lot of formulae and managing bibliography.

Then you discover that is id beautiful. Honestly, even using base style sets you above the typesetting of books. With some extra tweaks, it is beautiful.

Did I spend a lot of time on LaTeX during my PhD. Sure! But (even counting in all masochism involved into dealing with LaTeX) I both cherish this time, and the results.

iNic• 1 year 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.

shermantanktop5• 1 year 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.

gf0004• 1 year ago

Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no chance of noticing unless a full review.

And publishing is the primary way academics communicate en large - it's kinda important to be able write your specific notation without resorting to drawing on paper.

commandersaki2• 1 year 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

Second is a Enduring Power of Attorney:

- https://typst.app/project/rs9ZgGLhgM7iPvFs7PQv5O

Third a will:

- https://typst.app/project/r45dVk6MpLjsoXMvxkTxsE

pityJuke• 1 year 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.

veunes5• 1 year ago

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

vessenes5• 1 year 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!

dkga3• 1 year ago

Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?

vessenes5• 1 year 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-wumpus4• 1 year 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.

vessenes5• 1 year 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.

gucci-on-fleek7• 1 year ago

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

I'm surprised to hear that—I've been using GitHub Copilot with ConTeXt [0] since 2021, and it mostly works fairly well. And ConTeXt is much more obscure than Typst (but also much older, so maybe that gives it an advantage?).

[0] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Introduction/Quick_Start

vessenes5• 1 year ago

I’ll tell you my failing prompt - hopefully you can help! I haven’t tried since 4.0 / o3 / 2.5 pro came out.

I want a flowed book layout (so we have a facing page with inner and outer margins.)

I am rendering chats in the main part of the page. Chats alternate left and right alignment so it looks a bit like a text conversation. For each chat I want to put metadata (reactions, sender, time) on the margin it is aligned to.

So For a left chat, on a left page, I want to use the left (outside) margin. A left chat right hand page the inside margin.

Two things I could not get sorted: first, perfect vertical alignment between the chat and metadata, ( I think this is possible but difficult) and a persnickety bug where the first chat on each page chooses the last page’s proper margin side.

Happy to pay for an answer - I did try to hire a typesetter for this as well.

dkga3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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!

thezoq24• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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

lblume6• 1 year ago

It is hard to write macros in LaTeX.

freehorse• 1 year 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-wumpus4• 1 year ago

To be fair $x^2=1$ literally works in typst.

kzrdude3• 1 year 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.

Paapaa7• 1 year 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.

dleslie3• 1 year 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-wumpus4• 1 year 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.

dleslie3• 1 year 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.

agnishom3• 1 year ago

implementing critical features in the closed source portion

Like which critical features, for example?

dleslie3• 1 year ago

For now, that's the entire collaboration component. It would make sense to build a portion of document rendering in that context which won't be found in the open source portions. A value-add to convince users to subscribe.

eviks• 1 year ago

neglecting the open source part

So it's no different than fully open sourced projects.

cAtte_• 1 year ago

you are wrong. typst's lead dev has stated that an important goal is to have the CLI (which is open source) and web app behave identically, even refusing to implement such a basic feature as PDF embedding because, due to technical reasons, it is currently incompatible with this goal. [1]

typst, the project, is not by any means a "mix" of open and closed, even if typst, the company, is. indeed, the most thorough LSP implementation available (tinymist) is not only open source but a community project. for another funny example see typstify, a paid typst editor not affiliated with the company. [2]

[1] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145#issuecomment-17531...

[2] https://typstify.com/purchase/

jorams• 1 year ago

I believe their intentions are good, and keeping functionality the same for different outputs to avoid fragmentation is good too. An alternative interpretation, however, directly in line with the fear expressed by GP, is that they're already crippling the open source CLI because they can't support the feature in the closed source web app.

veunes5• 1 year ago

On the flip side, new tools like Typst are trying to push the UX forward in ways that the LaTeX ecosystem often struggles with. I think it comes down to what risks you're comfortable with

mayli• 1 year ago

Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex generated PDFs.

diffeomorphism4• 1 year ago

Yes, obviously. Do you delete all source code once you compiled a binary?

Any future corrections, additions or other modifications are made to the source, not the generated old pdf.

Paapaa7• 1 year ago

Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.

meehai• 1 year ago

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf hm ?

josephg• 1 year ago

Yep. I wrote an academic paper a few months ago in Typst. I used the VS Code extension for live previewing. All totally opensource and it works great.

thezoq24• 1 year ago

That is a real concern, but I wouldn't say there are any critical features in the closed source portion. I wrote the whole thesis locally with only open source tools. One of the included papers was written in the cloud platform for collaboration.

It is a concern that there is a single company doing most of the development, but there is quite a bit of community involvement so I don't think it is an immediate concern

ykonstant7• 1 year ago

In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained.

The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No. Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on handsomely.

Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down the line it is possible that maintained forks will be controlled by big publishers paying maintainers to deal with the insanity of its internals. And we all know how lovely those publishers are (凸ಠ益ಠ)凸

shakna• 1 year ago

TeX Live started in 1996, current update release is March, and has active conferences next year. They're an open source group, that has so far survived the test of time, and I'd suggest motivations are there to keep that into the distant future.

Unless academia collapses.

agnishom3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

aragilar3• 1 year ago

Not only do you need to use LaTeX, but you need to use the journal's class file. Anything else will get rejected.

thezoq24• 1 year ago

That is for sure my biggest concern with typst. I wrote a tool that can convert from typst to latex for final submissions, but it is a bit sketchy and at the moment won't handle math very well. https://gitlab.com/theZoq2/ttt

Paapaa7• 1 year ago

There are already at least two publishers which accept Typst. So that "ever" part is already covered. But most still don't accept Typst and LaTeX is usually mandatory if the sources are required.

tcfhgj• 1 year ago

which ones?

ykonstant7• 1 year ago

I sincerely doubt they will: most journals in pure math still do not accept LuaTeX; just think about that.

Rendello• 1 year ago

It makes sense. LaTeX fetishists tend to be sadomasochists.

dimatura• 1 year ago

Yeah, that was my first thought. And it's not just about them accepting typst, but also whether they would provide a template using typst, like they currently do for latex. Using the conference/journal template to write the article saves a lot of time for both submitters and editors (who have to deal with hundreds, if not thousands of submissions).

KnuthIsGod• 1 year ago

Typist will probably be dead or acquihired in a few years.

Latex will be around for decades.

lblume6• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

nxpnsv2• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Personally, I write for humans.

veunes5• 1 year ago

The idea of publishing as an animation + Typst doc actually sounds pretty compelling… the old PDF format is starting to feel pretty stale

a5c114• 1 year 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.

dwayne_dibley2• 1 year ago

- AI is the primary audience for our writing

I've been wondering about this a lot lately, specifically if there's a way to optimise my writing for AI to return specific elements when it's scraped/summarised (or whatever).

Maken2• 1 year ago

LaTeX can compile to HTML. PDF is just one of many compilation targets, that happens to look nice in almost any platform.

aitchnyu• 1 year 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.

lblume6• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

ykonstant7• 1 year 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__• 1 year 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.

Bayes7• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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

barrucadu• 1 year ago

Why would you want to implement an entire typesetting engine yourself?

xigoi6• 1 year ago

Since when is TypeScript a typesetting engine?

veunes5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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

Paapaa7• 1 year 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.

thezoq24• 1 year 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

msravi3• 1 year 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.

cbolton4• 1 year 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.

aragilar3• 1 year ago

You could use unicode-maths?

davemp• 1 year 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.

msravi3• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

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

GiovanniP2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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_dibley2• 1 year ago

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

sydon• 1 year ago

Congrats OP on your PhD!

poulpy1232• 1 year 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.

codeape4• 1 year ago

From 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• 1 year ago

Do you feel the same about Markdown?

Just curious.

codeape4• 1 year ago

No, I like Markdown.

lolinder• 1 year 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• 1 year 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?

codeape4• 1 year ago

Imagine the rapid advancements we could make in those fields if researchers stop wasting time on a baroque, outdated typesetting system.

OkayPhysicist2• 1 year ago

The major selling point to me, is that I can write the content I want, in a rather straightforward manner, and then just apply whatever formatting is necessary. It makes a lot of sense in the context of, say, university, where you're taking multiple classes, which each use different formatting guidelines, but those formatting guidelines stay the same for the duration of the course. I could just figure out (either using existing formats, or by hand-rolling my own) a document type for each class, and then never think about formatting again, whereas with a word processor, you've got to keep in mind the arcane series of steps necessary format your document in whatever style you require, and then pray that any modifications you make don't break the formatting.

The other place it's useful is heavily typeset documents, especially those subject to somewhat frequent modification, like a resume.

codeape4• 1 year ago

Using a word processor (MS Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice Writer) is nearly as bad as using LaTeX (in some cases, worse).

Using a plain-text format like Markdown, ReStructuredText or AsciiDoc is likely better in almost all cases.

jonathanstrange3• 1 year 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.

rcpt5• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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#%...

Although it doesn't look like Scheme, it has the full power of Scheme.

cbondurant• 1 year 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.

noelwelsh3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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

mollerhoj2• 1 year ago

it is not strange that these systems don’t do incremental compiles? Things are literally paged.. Why does newer systems such as typst do full compiles when a single page is edited? I know that all subsequent pages might be affected, but surely, one could workaround this by allowing sloppy but fast compile options for subsequent pages, that sacrifices correct layout for something decent?

flokl• 1 year ago

Well Typst does incremental compilation with the "watch" command which allows, for most documents, live preview.

lizimo2• 1 year 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/

lol7682• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

lizimo2• 1 year 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_q...

film42• 1 year ago

Thanks for your comment! I have a few PDFs that I need to generate for groups of users every so often and since wkhtmltopdf is considered EOL, I've been forced to use chrome (which sucks to manage). I just rewrote that code to use Typst (via the typst gem) and it's so so so much better.

stefanos82• 1 year ago

I keep an eye on 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!

lol7682• 1 year ago

This is very cool; I wish it was supported by the TeXiFy-IDEA plugin.

imtringued4• 1 year ago

Please tell the setzer developers about this: https://github.com/cvfosammmm/Setzer/

fabiensanglard• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

What will it be about? (please say Quake Black Book)

crossroadsguy3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

crossroadsguy3• 1 year ago

I shall definitely explore that.

alok-g• 1 year 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.

crossroadsguy3• 1 year ago

I will see if there’s some app that supports https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8-pandocs-markdown.html | https://www.speakon.org.uk/MarkupBinder/beta/docs/Markdown/P...

xiaohanyu• 1 year 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#concl...

I admit that typst is quite promising and given enough time, its adoption will increase quite a lot.

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

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