I rewrote my CV in Typst and I'll never look back | Hacker News Reader

I rewrote my CV in Typst and I'll never look back

mattrighetti.com

73 pointsTerretta25 comments

I'll be curious to see if Typst will at all have the lasting power of TeX. If it doesn't for whatever reason (maybe the authors get bored of it in a decade?), OP will certainly have to look back.

TeX is essentially hermetically sealed, device-independent software, all the way down to how the curves of the fonts are constructed. It's in some sense better than open source: all of the code is written in a precise, expository manner, than can be understood by any computer scientist 100 years from now. It can be purchased as a literal and markedly beautiful book, typeset in itself. It has virtually zero dependencies. It has been around now for ca. 50 years. It has a vibrant and passionate community of users. It's in the workflows of academic publishers.

TeX is a beacon of truly long lasting, unkillable, maintainable software.

All that is true, but the errors produced by the compiler, unconventional syntax and steep learning curve make Tex something that could be improved.

Knuth is a brilliant computer scientist who has contributed much of benefit to the field, but the default Computer Modern font in TeX-generated documents is a blinding exception (for me at least.)

Though it's basically a copy of Monotype Modern, which I also find hard to read and ugly whenever I encounter it in old books or journals.

What are some examples of old books or journals you encounter, that use Monotype Modern?

For me, Computer Modern Font (CMF) looks like it's an example for how to write Metafont.

The serifs are incredibly pronounced, making every document typeset with it look like a Roman tombstone. But that's a common theme with (La)TeX: It tries to look like a book from a long-gone by century. It reproduces a very conservative aesthetic.

(La)TeX stayed frozen in time, trying to perfect typesetting for a fixed output medium at a certain pixel density whilst the majority of users view the same text on very different displays, with different size, pixel density, aspect ratio, orientation, ...

I think most people use latex for two reasons: 1. Declarative documents. No need to manually reference figures, pages, equations, sections etc. Things are just laid out nicely by default with proper spaces between paragraphes, figures, tables etc. However, the above features you can basically achieve using markdown. 2. The "sciency" default style of the document.

Latex is great, but installing it is a hassle. FWIW, typst is lean enough to install (very quickly) as a vscode extension. I’ve never had a useful Tex install that was less than like 4gb

You may want to try https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic, which downloads files from TeXLive on-demand.

Love LaTeX but it gets harder to justify because of the faff in processing the files across multiple systems. Pdftex, xetex, xelatex, blah blah blah, adding fonts, packages galore...

Recently:

I've managed to "stablize" a Maven-based latex build by throwing it away and just using Github actions to generate the PDF. Hallelujah, it worked!

I've had to compile my CV on multiple machines for various reasons of expediency, and I've tried to use VSCode, but it takes an age to setup and I can't figure it out, so back to TexPad (now -> Texifier) I go, and fiddle with the settings until it compiles.

Somebody point me to a system that works across Macs and non-Macs please.

If Typst can somehow build that ecosystem of packages (personally, I use it for letters, reports, my CV, and a songbook for the ukulele with tab diagrams) then it'll truly be a killer.

I tried this out this week for a 2 page technical memo. It generally works great, and pandoc can sort of convert latex to typst to get you started, but the crucial thing it’s missing atm is the ability to embed pdf images. You have to convert to svg or a rasterized format first. Way too much of my workflows are written to produce visualizations in pdf, and this creates enough friction to keep me from using it for anything bigger than a memo. Other than the pdf thing though, I’m sold. The improved compilation time (which is not an overleaf thing — latex is slow) is huge

I've read the full docs, plus explored the code in github, and found zero information about how Typst handles hyphenation. This is big 'no go' for any work not in English. Which is surprising since the authors are German!

Typst handles hyphenation very similarly to TeX.

https://github.com/typst/hypher

https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/hypher/

Thank you. How do you set the language in Typst?

#set text(lang: "de") would set it to German for instance.

The output looks great. For a resume though, you'll definitely want to export it as with minimal formatting to .docx, test it with a few ATS systems to see if it can be scraped correctly. Even then it probably didn't matter much as a lot of automatic accept/reject decisions are currently based on AI scoring.

How do you check your resume against a ATS?

I started with https://www.jobscan.co/ and a couple other ones from a search for ats scanners to of course find out that my resume is apparently lacking.

> Last time I tried to setup LaTex on my mac I just gave up because it was too much work, this seems to be agreed upon a lot of other users too so I don’t feel alone on this, am I?

It seems like I am not part of those many users. On mac yoi can install the full texlive distribution with the default GUI using home brew easily.

brew install --cask mactex

Or if you just want the basic and without any applications you can install basictex

brew install --cask basictex

Then you may use tlmgr to install tools/packages that you need.

Or you can do it using tex live utility (GUI) which can be installed easily

brew install --cask tex-live-utility

I am confused where these users are. Even without brew it’s stupidly simple to install on a Mac: just download MacTeX (https://tug.org/mactex/). It’s a simple installer, and installs a few GUI tools too for those that want them.

I’m more curious how people are overcomplicating the install process so much that it makes it impossible to figure out how to install? I always though “open installer package” was a relatively low bar..

I used to use latex to write my CV. It looked beautiful and it definitely looked “better” than other CVs (I have seen hundreds of CVs while interviewing ICs). One day I found out that I could produce the same high-quality CV using Word (I just installed the latex font, was it Modern Computer?). My Word license expired but I could produce the exact same PDF using Libre Office. I’m happy I don’t rely on latex anymore.

I’ll bet I can tell which version is LaTeX or Word.

I could be the odd one here but I wrote my resume in Emacs OrgMode with LaTeX embeddings for some decorations.

It was a nice balance between of the two worlds.

https://gitlab.com/Arun-Mani-J/resume

I have tried other ways like using Libre Office, Reactive Resume etc. but a plain-text Git versioned file is very very comfortable.

unfortunately the article leaves out the corresponding LaTeX example.

to me the given typst example doesn't look like it would be much easier than a comparable example in LaTeX.

taking a look here: https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/ i don't see much that stands out as a real improvement. most are just differences. if you prefer one over the other, great. for me, i don't really care. either one looks fine to me. but if it comes down to it, LaTeX syntax at the text level looks less complex.

on the other hand, defining your own commands or environments in LaTeX is not as easy, and actual code syntax is far away from traditional programming language syntax.

so if you do a lot of coding in LaTeX, then maybe typst will be easier to use. but to maintain my CV i don't have to write any code.

If you take into account who (or ever more likely what) is going to read/ingest that CV, LaTeX might not be the best way to go about producing a pdf.

Looks promising.

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