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Comment by reikonomusha | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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, ...

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

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