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Comment by iNic | Hacker News Reader

I like the "Why should I use Typst instead of ..." section on the webpage. Tells me immediately what I want to know. More websites should have this.

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Conspicuously missing a comparison to Overleaf, arguably the most similar in nature to what this is trying to achieve. Cool project, nevertheless.

Could you clarify what you mean? They explicitly compare against LaTeX, on which Overleaf is built, and I don't see any points in their comparison which are mitigated by specifically using Overleaf.

Overleaf solves a lot of the same problems as Typst, although since it's still within the LateX ecosystem. For example changes are immediately visible (or immediately after a recompile, but practically I almost never notice) and Overleaf tries it's best to parse and simplify the dense error messages. So some of their points against LateX have been partially/entirely solved.

Typst looks cool, and I'm probably going to check it out at some point, but a comparison to similar web-based LateX solutions would be more useful than what they have at the moment is all I'm saying.

That is not what typst is though, it really is just a language and a compiler which you can just run in your commandline (and a fast one at that). There is that flashy web interface, but that is separate from typst itself, but you don't need to use that, it really is a latex replacement.

right, Typst is bigger than the online editor. The language and compiler would replace latex. It seems Overleaf is an online editor?

Yup. Because installing (or doing anything with) Latex sucks. Packaging sucks, settings things sucks, every package inventing its own syntax sucks. Overleaf solves some of those problems. It still doesn't help you a lot with nonsense error messages but at least you can see them in roughly correct places half the time.

You forgot to mention that error messages suck and that the standard workflow of invoking latex twice, then placing chicken feathers one the picture your first love, running bibtex, and finally running latex three more times ( or four if it's a full moon ) also sucks.

There are projects like Tectonic [1] that aim to fix that.

[1] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

You can’t avoid latex which is both good (huge ecosystem), and bad (it’s latex). Just recently I tried to help a friend with their CV where he wanted to raise the row-height in a pre-created CV “package”, and it was completely indecipherable, and I could only come up with an ugly hack.

Yes, LaTeX error messages are next to useless.

the biggest being I can copy in LateX file and get all the benefits of overleaf! I Love overleaf

> For example changes are immediately visible

The compilation speed of LateX doesn't really compare to Typst. With Typst I can work with 3 other students on the same paper, and all of our keystrokes are immediately rendered.

Right, my understanding was that by "immediately" they meant "way faster than LaTeX". You make a good point about consolidated errors though, I hadn't thought about that before.

for anybody who is wondering, the typst web app is a smoother user experience, having had to use overleaf for some smaller projects only, ive found it slightly janky, sometimes, probably owed to how slow and strange latex compilation can be. I'm sure the typist web app lacks some cool project management features that overleaf may offer, since it's a more mature platform, but with how much nicer typst is compared to latex, I think any shortcomings the web app may have are offset by that. but for sufficiently technical people collaborating via git is imo nicer than any web app.

Yeah, and comparison with Word make absolutely no sense. In word you don't need to go through the entire document to change some style, you just use predefined formatting styles like "Heading 1", "Quote", etc. and if you change something in those predefined styles it will be automatically applied to the entire document. You can also work with others on same document at the same time.

I wish that would work with non-tech people. In my experience, no matter how hard you try to teach them, they'll end up messing up the formatting in some way.

This. ALmost nobody knows/uses that feature.

FTR, there are also many people who use LaTeX in a similar way...

Which is a commentary on the UX of the feature, not on the users.

Fair enough - but how would you improve the UX?

Not a UX designer, but I would try worsening the UX of B/I/U/size operations to make users more inclined to reach for the formatting style picker instead. I would also heavily optimize the process to edit styles, so changing the font size of a heading changes all headings of that level unless you specify otherwise.

(In fact, as I talk through this, I think the solution may just be to abandon the idea that attributes like bold and size are applied directly to text, and instead associate them exclusively with styles. Basically the migration from <b> to <strong> at the dawn of CSS, in WYSIWYG form.)

Ultimately you'd end up with a word processor that's harder to use but easier to use right. And no sales team will greenlight that.

But this entire discussion is predicated on a very prescriptivist viewpoint of the "right" way to use a word processor.

How hard would you try to teach them to use Typst?

You can do the same thing with Typst. There may be fewer predefined "styles", but you can just define your own quite easily. And they're far more powerful than in Word.

This was cool, but the best thing was the dedicated transition guide from LaTeX to Typst[1].

The bottom section especially, which is a list of Typst's shortcomings compared to LaTeX. This helped a lot when actually choosing this over Overleaf for the last writing project I had.

[1] https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/

Where is this section? As soon as I read your comment, I wanted to go read this section and see if they mentioned tools like Google docs or Quip. Yet, I wasn't able to find any such section.

I liked "sign up for free and try it now" for the same reason.

Where is the comparison with markdown? Coming from a quarto/Rstudio background here

Markdown on its own isn’t in the same league as latex and similar systems. Off the top of my head, markdown doesn’t support: Figures outside the flow of the document, references, layouts (columns, etc), comments, formulas, a standard and good looking pdf output, page breaks, custom layouts for authors / abstract / etc, numbered chapters, autogenerated table of contents, custom blocks with different formatting, footnotes, appendixes and a whole lot more.

There are various “batteries included” markdown renderers - maybe like quarto - which add mermaid for diagrams and a few other features. But I’ve never seen a paper written in markdown with the same polish as what latex produces. It just doesn’t have the depth of features that you need for making a professional looking paper. Latex ships with all of that out of the box.

If their target market is people writing scientific papers, it makes sense that markdown isn’t in the list. Markdown isn’t a serious competitor.

This is not the same league, maybe not even the same sport.

Markdown is for convenient and quick "good enough" looking text editing. It is very good at what it is supposed to do, but the limitations are quite obvious.

Typst has its focus on editing scientific documents, something that Markdown was just not made for.

I agree they are playing different sports!

Ideally, unrendered markdown still provides a first-class reading experience.

I don't think Typst has that as a design goal.

Typst texts are quite readable, the language has explicit support to make it as good as feasible (e.g. longer text parameters can be passed unquoted within a [] block, so it is still left readable). Plus you can abstract away more complex configs inside a function, and end up with `#myFunc [My normal unquoted text]`

But it is apples to oranges, you can properly format text to book editor capabilities with typst, while you can only do basic stuff with markdown.

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