Comment by diarrhea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diarrhea | Hacker News Reader

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You're probably right in that LaTeX won't change, but I am beyond happy having left and picking up typst for a recent project. Despite existing limitations and beta-ness, it's already fantastic, and most importantly promising (has financial backing by now). Instant preview and precise as well as legible error messages alone make it so.

I had an initial document and development environment running within twenty minutes. That's impossible with LaTeX. In fact, for years, I had a tailor-made Docker image just for keeping LaTeX running, compiling and sane (I use more advanced features to make LaTeX bearable in $CURRENT_YEAR). That setup broke the other day.

I never investigated why, because an ecosystem where one has to go to such lengths in the first place, only to have it break, is not one I want to be a part of any longer. For typst, I can just grab the binary of the version I used and it will just work forever (or just compile it, which I have confidence will also be pretty stable for many years to come thanks to Rust).

> That's impossible with LaTeX.

Certainly not impossible. I don't find LaTeX hard to install, at least on a modern Linux distribution such as Ubuntu (and if memory serves, it wasn't hard on macOS either).

I agree that setting up a basic template from scratch can be tedious and I wish this was better, but the common approach for newbies is to copy a template from somewhere, and for more advanced users, they probably have some base template with personal tweaks that they keep reusing (I know I do, not only because I hate Computer Modern).

There are still a whole number of issues with LaTeX (such as incompatible packages, the inconsistency in font handling between pdflatex and xelatex, beamer is generally IMHO a mess, etc.) but what GP wrote - that old documents will continue to compile and give the same results - is true.

A base install isn't too hard, correct. The main downside there is that a full LaTeX distribution is gigabytes in size, but that's manageable. Just takes time. Leaving out docs or using a distribution with on-the-fly package installation can solve this.

Trouble arises when you're looking to use latexmk (requires Perl), bib2gls (requires a Java runtime), minted (requires Python), latexindent (requires specific Perl libraries), including SVG (requires InkScape, and I believe ImageMagick), ...

Any notion of a powerful, sane, batteries-included development environment (think Rust and Go) requires jumping through insane hoops, resulting in bespoke setups, always on the brink of breakage. I really don't want to manage Python venvs!

The LaTeX crowd is very old school and tooling isn't natively available or built with containerization in mind. I've grown to like single-binary approaches (Caddy, typst, ...). I find vanilla LaTeX documents (the type that will compile in 20 years to come) very weak. UTF-8 still isn't standard in "vanilla LaTeX" (pdflatex)!

UTF-8 works with xetex, and both it and latexmk are easily installable from package sources on Ubuntu (and probably other distros).

You do raise some valid points, but most people don't really use those programs you've mentioned (I've only ever used minted), and you have to consider the insane breadth of things (often very specific to particular scientific disciplines) that LaTeX and its ecosystem are dealing with. Plus, IMHO it's a bad choice to abandon LaTeX's maths notation (despite its obvious weaknesses) entirely because the institutional inertia here is incredibly high; it's used basically everywhere even outside LaTeX itself (MathJax, Discord bots, several online forums, etc.). Mathematicians (and students / researchers from adjacent disciplines) have become _really_ used to it. And unlike programmers, researchers don't usually need or want paradigm shifts every few years.

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