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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of thing that is ripe for Typst (https://typst.app/home). There is a CLI interface as well as a web app.

I’ve recently been working on a book using Typst after hacking LaTeX for many years. Through some examples and the docs I’ve already been able to accomplish much more customization on my own, rather than cargo-culting 20-year old snippets and packages, and the results are readable and maintainable. I don’t know if Typst will completely supersede LaTeX, but this point I think it is capable of doing so and I will be upset if it doesn’t.

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I’ve been doing LaTeX for some major portion of its life and I’ve see so many “LaTeX killers” come and go. But my documents from 25 years ago still compile and render.

Yeah, remember Lout? That was all the rage, briefly, about twenty years ago.

Wow, I was initially very enthusiastic about lout, and I still think it had some good ideas. I just remember the templates not being as easily hacked/tweaked as (La)TeX, and the advice was generally "accept how it already works" when people asked how to adjust things. Not a good sign. Also I remember--at least I think I do--that the source files had arbitrary f01.c f02.c f03.c names, so it was hard to guess where anything was. That was strange.

That's been my experience; either it's a beautiful template that does almost everything you ever wanted, but if you want that last 1-5%, you're doomed, or it's just another LaTeX-style tool that may be objectively better in some way, but it's fighting against 25+ years of experience getting LaTeX to do exactly what I want it to do (and providing quite sane defaults when I don't care).

And so will be in next century.

Every time I see typist, I see offline support is “coming soon”, and immediately move on.

Web app is not needed. You can write using any editor and compile locally using the typist cli.

Then it seems pretty misleading to put "offline support" under the "Coming soon" header.

Maybe it is the offline support for the web app

PDF support is also coming soon.

what do you mean ? It is possible to save as pdf

A web app? That won't work.

If these guys are for the money, Microsoft and Google have them covered. If they're for Open Source, Latex lets you do it locally.

In my experience, these attempts to provide some open-source-yet-somewhat-vendor-dependent solutions don't work.

It has a web app and a CLI. LaTeX also has both - it's just that the Typst web app has better integration with the actual engine than the various LaTeX web apps.

I can't predict the future by I really liked typst. I really hope they will find their market. And I almost wish I was still using latex to replace it with typst

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