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Comment by bmacho | Hacker News Reader

I feel ambivalent to LaTeX.

I don't like the language, the ecosystem is too big, complicated and breaks, but the end result is hard to do any other way.

This applies both the equations part, and the text reflow part (I think them as separate things, but they usually go together).

It should be possible to write text in HTML or markdown, and write the equations in latex or asciimath, and turn it into a beautiful/article style pdf, but sadly it is not.

Although CSS (colored and rounded boxes and such) + MathJax-SVG also can look nice.

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Document formatting seems like one of those problems where 80% or so of the problem space is simple and the remaining 20% is an unfathomable pit of nightmares.

There are so many different ways people could want characters printed on a sheet of virtual paper that the problem is virtually unconstrained in its difficulty.

TeX was a major theoretical advance, and LaTeX is a nice enough UI layer on TeX that has gotten significant traction. But even outside of TeX, it feels like even software like MS Word are impossibly complex and clunky.

You can make something nicer by dramatically simplifying or cutting the feature set. I think that's probably how Google Docs has a pretty simple interface. But I'm not convinced there's a real replacement for the incumbents that simply tries to improve UI without having a deep technical insight about document layout the way Knuth had with TeX.

Latex has a lot of caked in design mistakes which are never going away.

Unfortunately typst seems to have replicated the primary one - inventing a new turing complete programming language rather than piggybacking off an existing one.

It's possible to conceptualize a much better latex but it would take years to build properly and build the ecosystem around it to do all the odd things people need when doing markup requiring 1000-2000 community packages.

What are the other caked-in design mistakes in LaTeX, and which existing language(s) would you like to see a DSL piggybacked off?

Thing is, you can't really cut the feature set much. Nobody needs 90% of the features but for almost everyone there's some 10% of the less-used features that's a must-have, a total dealbreaker if the other tool doesn't have them or does them poorly; and that's a different 10% for different people, so if you have a cut-down feature set you lose many people - some because you don't have A, some because you don't have B, some because you don't have Z, and they all instead use the same old, complex tool that has support for "their thing".

Every time I encounter LaTeX, I think of something I heard: "You shouldn't need a build environment for a word processor." I can't get away from that sentiment. Almost nobody I've seen using LaTeX has actually been using it for typesetting. Usually they're using a typesetter for word processing.

Sometimes it feels like they're only using LaTeX because they "learned it in college." You ever notice that? So many people in LaTeX threads say they learned it in college, or they've been using the same setting since college, or whatever. People learn LaTeX to make college papers look nice, and then they never need to configure it again? Isn't that strange?

The worst part, though, is that people complain if you call it latex. Which I think says quite a lot about it's userbase.

Time to sunset Latex

https://github.com/typst/typst

No HTML export yet. Which this post is about.

I am hoping this is going to be implemented soon:

https://github.com/fenjalien/obsidian-typst/issues/5

How do you handle internationalization, and, in particular, hyphenation? That’s the main reason I use LaTeX for (well, specifically XeTeX & Tectonic, which are pretty modern). Without those two features, one might as well use LibreOffice, no?

It will be hard to replace LaTeX. I still use it. It's virtually bug-free and compiles documents from 30 years ago. I sincerely think it will be around for another 30. It's tried and tested and that's hard to find in the software world. Typst looks interesting though. I'll keep my eye on it...

Might still be pretty limited, but I've been looking for something with a more modern syntax for years, and this seems a good candidate! Thanks for sharing.

Of course it will take years to replace LaTeX, but we need to begin working on it.

Typst is still fairly limited. Luckily it has a strong webassembly based plugin interface. I am currently using it for anything I'd otherwise use latex for.

I started using it in the last couple of days after reading this and I find it amazing. It's limited in the sense that it may lack templates and a lot of other things, but it's so easy to code for it, that I expect the community will make everything that is needed really quickly. I am SO impressed. I love it.

This is from a week ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39027543

Talks about "htmldocs" (which shows maths formulas on one of their templates) but there are also various other alternatives mentioned in the discussion.

It's entirely possible. One tool one could use for this is Quarto: https://quarto.org/

I believe I have used pandoc to convert markdown to PDF. Maybe this is something you could try?

That’s probably what they were referring too when they described it as big, complicated, and fragile.

https://pandoc.org/chunkedhtml-demo/2.4-creating-a-pdf.html

Well you need to install the appropriate texlive dependencies which can be somewhat complicated, but once that's done it's just writing inline Latex

    $$\like{this}$$

into your Markdown files and then doing

    pandoc -f markdown -t pdf -o output.pdf input.md

Haven't used this in a while and just tried it again, was just a matter of searching a few error messages, gleaning the missing texlive package names from the results, and installing them. Works like a charm now.

I also had this working for Markdown to HTML conversion back in the day when I needed it, but that requires the website using a JS library like Mathjax.

Using REVTeX I honestly have no issues with LaTeX, especially if I just stick to Overleaf

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