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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm a moderately-experienced LaTeX user. What is the argument for me switching to typst? I read the repository's README, and would be tempted to consider it as a complete newbie with limited needs, but I couldn't find the compelling argument for ditching (La)TeX in favor of this. Especially given the size of the LaTeX community and availability and accessibility of (sometimes hacky) LaTeX solutions for a zillion situations.

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For me the biggest ones are:

1. Compilation is ridiculously fast. 2. The language is miles more intuitive, and doesn't require nearly as many hacks. In a handful of hours using typst I've written much more interesting things than I ever would've attempted using latex macros. This might be less important for you, but my latex usage is intermittent, so I've always forgotten it by the next document I write.

And do the intuitiveness and speed not come at the expense of some expressive power limitation?

I'm not a particularly hardcore latex user, but in my observation it's the opposite: Because it's a "real" programming language, not just a macro system, it scales much better to complex tasks. Even simple things generally take fewer characters than latex.

E.g., during the preview I built a very basic CAS with it, for simplifying and differentiating simple math expressions, in the span of an afternoon.

The speed comes from a clever incremental compilation model.

Apart from writing papers, I also use LaTeX to make presentations accompanying the papers (beamer). I make heavy use of tikz to create figures (I work in geometry-related field). The workflow is painful (slow compilation, bad overleaf support) to say the least. If typst could meet this need in the future (seems lacking at the moment), I won't hesitate to make a switch.

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