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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

Skip it and go straight to Typst.

Looks interesting and I could see this being adopted in limited situations. Most Latex users only use a tiny subset of its capabilities. Most non-math journals also easily accept non Latex manuscripts. The math part seems similar to Latex (without backslashes) which is important since most folks have built muscle memory there (not just for documents but also for typing math in other situations like Markdown docs and Mathjax or KaTeX websites)

The only issue is the ecosystem for specialized fields with their own typesetting requirements.

But I’m all for anything that is easier to debug than Latex.

That said I feel it will never truly compete with LaTeX in terms of adoption. LaTex is like SQL — it’s long in the tooth and has some minor design issues but represents something very fundamental that defies reinvention.

LaTeX is a de-facto standard in academia and journals. Makes it very hard to just skip and go to Typst or any of the other recent takes on math typesetting.

I kind of hoped that new contenders to LaTeX could ditch the state-based sections (e.g. `\section{Introduction}`) and switch to strictly scoped sections that are properly closed (i.e. section trees).

HTML is evidence that having to do a closing tag is an amusing non-starter for authored pages. Such that I don't see that flying too well.

The problem with HTML is that you name the tags and can close them anywhere.You could have something like this instead:

  \section{Introduction}{
    .
    .
    .
  }

I get the motivation. I'm not sold on the results. Especially since you will have a ton of machinery around what sections can go in other sections. It really is nicer to not have the brackets.

Sure, but a single pair of parentheses is enough:

[section[Introduction][...]]

Good point, never thought of that. Indentation would become hellish though.

Sections in my markup language work like that. I definitely find it a better approach.

https://xidoc.nim.town/commands.html#section

it's like suggesting to use julia for ML 5 years ago instead of using Python, because it is new. Nowadays is somewhat decent but still lags behind PyTorch and none cares, same will be for Typst unless something major happens.

For example, how I'm supposed to use a markdown language that doesn't have a tikz-like library? Sure you can still write commutative diagram but that's not all tikz does.

This looks neat.

I noticed it has a scripting language built in, but how might one use already made scripts in another language? For example, if I already have a make_plot.py script, can I just call it instead of rewriting everything in this new scripting language? It seems that this functionality would be absolutely crucial for adoption, but there's nothing but complaining and disagreement on the issue raised on this in the GitHub.

Would you happen to know if it is possible to convert an existing Latex document into Typst?

You could do it with Pandoc (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc), it supports both Latex and Typst as input and output formats, and can use either as a PDF engine.

Great - thanks so much!

Thank you for this, I might consider it for my next paper - it seems great at a first glance.

Do you use it on a daily basis? Any problems I should be aware of? I see quite a few open issues - do they actually matter?

I've utilized it to craft a number of high-school level mathematics and physics problems and solutions, and the experience was genuinely pleasing. The scripting language brings a fresh perspective to the markup language, while the plugin ecosystem is steadily expanding and improving.

Though I don't have firsthand experience in formatting documents to meet publication standards, the flexibility it offers seems promising for such applications.

My sincere hope is that it garners the recognition it truly deserves, and that significant publications in the future will embrace it, rolling out official templates directly in typst.

It can't embed PDFs and there doesn't seem to be a solution in sight, because they want to keep their software stack working in the browser. It supports embedding SVGs, but converting PDF to SVG never works well, so the only reliable option is to render the PDF to high-DPI PNG.

The font subsetting seems to be suboptimal. I had small documents that were a megabyte when they should have been a few kilobytes. This however can be fixed with PDF tools.

Would be great if they had stuck to typesetting Math instead of inventing a new programming language. Lot of scope creep there. Who wants to learn yet another programming language ?

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