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Comment by kitchi | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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