Typst: Compose Papers Faster
typst.app
typst.app
And while they haven't announced the platform itself to be open source, I'm glad they're at least already contributing some of the stuff they're making [1].
We do not want to lock anybody into our service, so you'll always be able to download Typst for the command line for free. Only the web app will remain proprietary.
> We will publish Typst's compiler source code as soon as our beta phase starts. From then on, it will form the Open Core of Typst, and we will develop and maintain it in cooperation with the community
Most likely something simplified will start out convenient and then accrue much of the complexity of LaTeX over years (because that is solving actual needs!) -- the only difference (pro) will be that new users will be slowly onboarded to this complexity over years and (con) have to wait a long time for this to catch up with necessary functionality. An interesting example to observe is Markdown variants thrashing around and diverging as they try to go beyond the simplest case and try to model the essential complexity of writing documents.
My only personal disappointment/nitpick is I didn’t see any mention of a web-native rendering. I had always hoped that what came after latex would be basically web pages that could become PDFs when necessary. Desires aside, I imagine having some story around HTML, interactive graphics and web browsers would probably be a good idea.
Otherwise, stoked to see this and best of luck to typst.
I’ve recently been looking for a quick way to write short “mathy” notes in markdown (with full MathJax for math) and share will collaborators for commenting and found HackMD to be nice for this (codiMd is the open source version).
I also found Authorea which looks nice but it does not let you comment on markdown text. And there is too much clicking around to write math.
Ideally there should be KB shortcuts for everything so one doesn’t have to keep clicking on the menu just to insert math.
Giving stuff to students/Universities for a low price is a tried principle, I can see them trying that out.
I’ve seen enough people failing to achieve what they want with LaTeX, and people making significant compromises in presentation because they either don’t know how to achieve something or can’t be bothered figuring it out or doing it. There are a great many things that it is capable of, but doesn’t make practical. LaTeX does not serve everyone’s needs. Not by a long shot.
What kind of output formats to you target? I assume PDF, but aside from that? HTML? epub?
Will you maintain a history of a document? I assume this will be a hosted platform, and as a user, I cannot just add a document into source control?
ePub is a subset of HTML so the latter would come first.
We will maintain a version history and offer the typical change tracking features, but this will likely be a paid feature for users who join after the beta.
How do you envision the process of submitting to journals looking?
MSWord and Latex are normal in this space and I’m not aware of any that take PDFs for the obvious reason that journals want control of the rendering. I can only presume that this is somewhat of a fraught tech lock-in that resists new formats/languages/backends.
In the meantime, many conferences just want camera-ready PDFs for their proceedings. Additionally, Typst will be useful in a university/lab/research group context and for tech reports right away!
Latex just has too many options which lead to a lot of wasted effort to get the result you want, some of which don't play nicely with each other.