[HN Gopher] Typst - Compose Papers Faster
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Typst - Compose Papers Faster
Author : iNic
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-11-20 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (typst.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (typst.app)
| iNic wrote:
| I like the "Why should I use Typst instead of ..." section on the
| webpage. Tells me immediately what I want to know. More websites
| should have this.
| kitchi wrote:
| Conspicuously missing a comparison to Overleaf, arguably the
| most similar in nature to what this is trying to achieve. Cool
| project, nevertheless.
| sestep wrote:
| Could you clarify what you mean? They explicitly compare
| against LaTeX, on which Overleaf is built, and I don't see
| any points in their comparison which are mitigated by
| specifically using Overleaf.
| kitchi wrote:
| Overleaf solves a lot of the same problems as Typst,
| although since it's still within the LateX ecosystem. For
| example changes are immediately visible (or immediately
| after a recompile, but practically I almost never notice)
| and Overleaf tries it's best to parse and simplify the
| dense error messages. So some of their points against LateX
| have been partially/entirely solved.
|
| Typst looks cool, and I'm probably going to check it out at
| some point, but a comparison to similar web-based LateX
| solutions would be more useful than what they have at the
| moment is all I'm saying.
| sestep wrote:
| Right, my understanding was that by "immediately" they
| meant "way faster than LaTeX". You make a good point
| about consolidated errors though, I hadn't thought about
| that before.
| TT-392 wrote:
| That is not what typst is though, it really is just a
| language and a compiler which you can just run in your
| commandline (and a fast one at that). There is that
| flashy web interface, but that is separate from typst
| itself, but you don't need to use that, it really is a
| latex replacement.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| 1. Why not use Markdown-compatible syntax?
|
| 2. Why would we want to observe changes in real time? Do you want
| this when coding too?
|
| My workflow (that I share with co-authors) is to write everything
| in Markdown (using Pandoc to get PDF output). When we are almost
| finished, we export (again with Pandoc) to LaTeX.
|
| We collaborate on Git, because, just as when programming, I don't
| want my co-authors to witness my crappy thought process. That's
| just noise. Git allows us to use different Git-branches for the
| arxiv version, the conference version, and the journal version.
| We also use tags to indicate different submissions.
| huijzer wrote:
| 1. Why not use Markdown-compatible syntax?
|
| I'm not an Typst author, but I don't get your point. How are
| you going to specify a 2 column outlay, for example? Markdown
| is not very expressive. You can always compile (less
| expressive) Markdown to Typst.
|
| 2. Why would we want to observe changes in real time? Do you
| want this when coding too?
|
| You prefer to debug by looking at the code only?
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| 1. Using `classoption: twocolumn`
|
| 2. I see that I wasn't completely clear. I meant: why do we
| want to see our collaborators' changes in real time? To me,
| that would be very disturbing.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| > My workflow (that I share with co-authors) is to write
| everything in Markdown (using Pandoc to get PDF output). When
| we are almost finished, we export (again with Pandoc) to LaTeX.
|
| That's your (and my) workflow. However, there is clearly demand
| for a collaborative workflow, as demonstrated by Overleaf and
| ShareLaTeX before that.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I'm afraid the ship has sailed and people will use latex for ever
| (I personally use Word but with lots of customizations).
|
| why use latex (and this is coming from someone who prefers Word
| to latex):
|
| - much better tooling than any other format
|
| - much more discussion on various problems you'll hit.
|
| - much more training data for chatgpt and other LLMs, so your
| personal assistant can help you with latex syntax. good luck
| getting that level of support for typst or any other new
| programming language.
|
| - network effect -- if your professor only knows latex, you can't
| use typst. and professors are slow/reluctant to adopt new shiny
| tech. if it has worked in the past 50 years, why change it?
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| You can get really far today with Pandoc Markdown, which has
| many benefits over LaTeX. So, just wait until a generation has
| grown up with Markdown as a universal text language. Indeed,
| with the exception of the journal's template, you can write a
| full paper in Pandoc Markdown and nobody would spot the
| difference.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| tbqh, any serious paper writing requires formatting
| considerations that Markdown cannot express.
|
| Like, if you care at all about how your paper looks, Markdown
| is insufficient.
| contravariant wrote:
| I think with pandoc there's very little you can't do, but I
| never tested it to its limits. Nowadays I only use LaTeX if
| I really need the nitty gritty formatting capabilities, at
| which point adding an extra layer of indirection is
| pointless.
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| Can you link a scientific article or book pdf that was
| written in Markdown?
| esafak wrote:
| https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/#books
| IshKebab wrote:
| You can get quite far... but really if you're writing a big
| technical document with a Markdown style format you
| _definitely_ want Asciidoc, not Markdown.
| huijzer wrote:
| I'm not affiliated to Typst and still think LaTeX at this point
| in time is one of the worst things to deal with as an academic.
| Errors can be extremely unclear.
|
| And yeah sure many discussions for all kinds of packages and
| backends except for that one backend or package that you are
| running.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| tbqh IME using Copilot for LaTeX has been pretty hit or miss,
| so I'm not sure the AI point is as pertinent.
|
| The network effect aspect is very real, but I've been seeing
| Typst pop up in my academic circles.
| huijzer wrote:
| I've been using Typst in production to generate a PDF on the fly
| and it has been amazing. Much smaller dependencies than LaTeX and
| it was also extremely fast. The syntax takes a bit of getting
| used to but compared to LaTeX I can't complain. It looks like a
| powerful syntax.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| I would recommend testing Markdown and Pandoc. It's open
| source, and it can export to pdf (via latex), html, latex,
| doc(x), odt, rst, wiki, ...
| huijzer wrote:
| I needed a pretty PDF with headers and footers. Markdown was
| not expressive enough.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| As of late I've been using restructuredtext and
| rst2latex.py and have been quite happy with it. I'm quite
| used to LaTeX for writing equations and RST handles most of
| the other boilerplate. If you do need to do fancy TeX
| things you can still just drop that inline and it generally
| works pretty good.
| IshKebab wrote:
| RestructuredText is pretty awful in my experience. Barely
| documented and unreliable.
|
| Asciidoc is much much much better.
| rochak wrote:
| Time to rewrite my resume using this. If anyone knows any similar
| tools, please share them.
| legobmw99 wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is very cool. What's the pricing you anticipate?
| TT-392 wrote:
| The compiler is open source, and written in rust. The web
| interface is free, and I think it will stay that way? (I think
| they run on donations). They could really use some clearer
| marketing on the front page...
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| This was built initially by two PhD students in Germany if I
| remember correctly, they then spun it off into a company. Super
| impressive given how difficult typesetting is. And it's written
| in Rust as well!
| drsir wrote:
| I believe they were masters students not PhD students.
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