Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teleforce | Hacker News Reader

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This is one the most recent posts on Typst with 159 comments [1]. Why it is not appear on HN past when checked just baffled me, perhaps Dang or someone as can explain.

I think the closest system to typst is Overleaf (I hope they put in their website comparison menu), but the killer feature is that Typst apparently can support local-first that Overleaf does not, and it's wonderful feature for those who are writing a lot even when camping in remote areas (ok I'm stretching a bit there).

Since the Typst's document compiler is open source then it feasible to integrate it with Docusaurus and Tinasaurus (based on TinaCMS). But again there is also Pretext that is open source that can be used as document compiler alternative to Typst [2].

[1]Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210

[2] PreTeXt: Write Once, Read Anywhere:

https://pretextbook.org/index.html

[3] PreTeXt: Write Once Read Anywhere Authoring and Publishing System:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37231025

The local-first version of Overleaf is just LaTeX, or am I missing something?

Maybe OP means the collaboration feature. I don't know whether local typst supports that though. Expecting online collaboration in "local first" may be an oxymoron in itself...

The pro version of Overleaf supports offline work with a simple trick: every Overleaf document can be accessed as a git repo. It's a bit limited (there's no branches or tags, and it breaks the "track changes" feature) and trying to convince the average researcher to learn git is a challenge, but if you know git it works quite well.

There's also the fact that you can't auth using pub keys, and are consequently stuck using password auth (as a workaround, I usually just set the credential cache expiration to some huge value). Despite this, it's only half-annoying, but again, as you pointed out, only if one of your collaborators happens to have the premium version.

I really hope the typst webapp gets git support soon so it at least gets feature parity with Overleaf in this department (issue tracker: https://github.com/typst/webapp-issues/issues/25).

As far as I know, local Typst does not support collaboration. At least not in the way the online version and Overleaf do.

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