Hacker News Reader

Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid the ship has sailed and people will use latex for ever (I personally use Word but with lots of customizations).

why use latex (and this is coming from someone who prefers Word to latex):

- much better tooling than any other format

- much more discussion on various problems you'll hit.

- much more training data for chatgpt and other LLMs, so your personal assistant can help you with latex syntax. good luck getting that level of support for typst or any other new programming language.

- network effect -- if your professor only knows latex, you can't use typst. and professors are slow/reluctant to adopt new shiny tech. if it has worked in the past 50 years, why change it?

View on HN

I mean by that logic we should still be using FORTRAN for our research code and there’s no point developing new languages because the space is explored at this point.

Really I think the main thing holding it back are the lack of templates supported by journals and conferences and some known rendering bugs / limitations that are being worked on.

I think the main blocking point is that TeX algorithms are near optimal for a lot of the technical typesetting and everything else looks somewhat off to the astute readers, and those readers are repeat consumers of the technical texts.

It's not as though the TeX algorithms are secret and can't possibly be recreated elsewhere.

Absolutely. There simply hasn’t been a better/faster implementation outside the existing TeX ecosystem so far. Returning to the comment that I replied to: everybody could rewrite/extend Fortran; it will still be Fortran.

Just for the record, FORTRAN is #12 on tiobe [1], leaving go and swift behind.

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

TIOBE is still behind useless. It once listed Visual Basic ahead of JS. It has as much relevance to sorting programming languages as alphabetical ordering.

You can get really far today with Pandoc Markdown, which has many benefits over LaTeX. So, just wait until a generation has grown up with Markdown as a universal text language. Indeed, with the exception of the journal's template, you can write a full paper in Pandoc Markdown and nobody would spot the difference.

tbqh, any serious paper writing requires formatting considerations that Markdown cannot express.

Like, if you care at all about how your paper looks, Markdown is insufficient.

I think with pandoc there's very little you can't do, but I never tested it to its limits. Nowadays I only use LaTeX if I really need the nitty gritty formatting capabilities, at which point adding an extra layer of indirection is pointless.

Can you link a scientific article or book pdf that was written in Markdown?

https://quarto.org/docs/gallery/#books

The PDFs of my recent books, Effective XGBoost, and Learning Python for Data were created using markdown and Pandoc (somewhere along the way).

I'm in the middle of doing the second edition of Effective Pandas, moving it from rst based tooling to markdown/Pandoc.

You can get quite far... but really if you're writing a big technical document with a Markdown style format you definitely want Asciidoc, not Markdown.

I tried md for a while but inevitably ended up having to incorporate latex in the document for formatting (either through md or pandoc). at that point, you might as well use latex.

I’m not affiliated to Typst and still think LaTeX at this point in time is one of the worst things to deal with as an academic. Errors can be extremely unclear.

And yeah sure many discussions for all kinds of packages and backends except for that one backend or package that you are running.

Completely with you. It’s time to move on from Latex. Couldn’t hope more for the success of a better alternative!

This so much. LaTex syntax is not that bad, but there are so many layers of templates that Tex errors are cryptic at best.

tbqh IME using Copilot for LaTeX has been pretty hit or miss, so I'm not sure the AI point is as pertinent.

The network effect aspect is very real, but I've been seeing Typst pop up in my academic circles.

I think points 2 and 3 only really apply if we assume the number of problems encountered with LaTeX and Typst are roughly similar. After all, how much of an issue is finding solutions if you never run into issues in the first place? And this is where I think competing platforms can pull ahead of LaTeX - it's already a huge pain to learn and use, so if a new standard becomes much more convenient.. why not switch?

Yeah, the LaTeX ship has sailed, I'll never touch it again. I'm very happy that I can use Typst instead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com