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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I am probably in the 90th percentile of TeX users, but I have to say that it's hard for me to think that there's much space between markdown and TeX for another typesetting language. Markdown is easy to write and read but very constrained, while TeX is a bit harder and essentially infinitely flexible.

The biggest issue I have seen with TeX is a people problem: people frequently write spaghetti TeX with horrible style. This is terrible, but it is not actually a language issue. Writing it with a "docs are code" mindset can produce some very clean results. The second biggest issue is that there isn't a good TeX -> HTML compiler.

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"The second biggest issue is that there isn't a good TeX -> HTML compiler." This is the crux of the problem in using just TeX for writing books: it focuses on producing camera-ready output at the expense of literally everything else.

reStructuredText isn't itself a typesetting language. It's meant to be something of an interposer between the semantic meaning of what you're writing and the thing that does the typesetting. The hope is that it, unlike something heavily constrained like Markdown, gives you the tools to capture that semantic meaning and transform it into something that can be typeset.

Like, the goal isn't to throw out TeX. The goal is to be able to target TeX as a typesetter along with Web browsers and e-book readers and even things like GNU info and troff without having to rewrite the content wholesale to fit each one.

Personally, I would rather just have TeX itself target the web rather than wedging another layer into the typesetting stack. As far as I know, other than the sheer size of the language, there is nothing fundamental stopping someone (I guess me, eventually) from writing "htmlatex."

Modern web pages are already designed with "camera ready" in mind, essentially with browser width being the only thing that changes layout.

My point is more that TeX is a typesetter just as a Web browser is. They're incompatible typesetting systems with wildly different command languages.

I think the poster above wants to run TeX in js to format the text. I have seen a bunch of hyphenation and suchlike stretching back years not sure about running a full engine.

Maybe Typst (https://typst.app/) is a good in-between?

I used typst for a recent project and I love it. It’s essentially all the power of latex but with modern sensibilities. And it’s a cute little programming language - with support for variables, functions, json data loading, 3rd party libraries, and all sorts of other nice to haves.

I just wish the typst compiler had a way to output html. It would be perfect for making online documentation and blog posts.

I see typst mentions HTML output, is this only possible with something besides the the CLI? It looks very cool, going to try it out at the first opportunity.

HTML output with Typst isn't possible yet, but it has a high priority.

For the upcoming release, we decided to prioritize print layout and the shortcomings we have there. The release after (think late fall) will focus on HTML and accessible output. The plan is to create a turn-key solution for technical writing, docs, and document automation.

Thankyou for your work! It’s a delight.

Indeed, I don't see the reason for someone to learn LaTex now that Typst is here.

Are you an actual LaTeX user? If so, what have you used it for that you can now use Typst for? For me, the answers are yes, and nothing.

TikZ/PGF ?

The Cetz package looks like a promising alternative to TikZ.

https://github.com/cetz-package/cetz

In computer science, we still need LaTeX because conferences and journals require the use of their official LaTeX template.

You should check out Scribble which uses Racket. It has a bunch of different renderers including HTML and Markdown. However, unlike Markdown, you can easily write extensions for it in Lisp, even within the document itself. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/running.html#%28part._...

I suppose that makes it inappropriate for something like rendering comments, but it's a great way to write documents. I used it a lot for writing papers since there's a lot less boilerplate and was much easier to use than TeX.

My problem with the TeX ecosystem is it's so non-modular. Bring in this package to add a new font with some extra dingbats, and suddenly you lose proper linebreaking inside boxed environments. And so on.

What advice do you have for writing "docs are code" LaTeX?

I find LaTeX to be the lesser of evils when creating PDFs. However, I rarely deal with LaTeX issues these days because all of the pain points have been patched away in my tooling that converts md to tex. However, I keep thinking something more modern or faster (like Typst) might make my life as an author easier. Compiling LaTeX with tools like rubber is still painful and slow.

A few things:

1. Separate each part of a document into different TeX files and include them in the main document. Each file should be a separate unit of the work. Only compile the main document when you need to.

2. Generally write with readability in mind and use newlines and other whitespace in the source a lot more than you think you should.

3. If you have common boilerplate that you frequently use at the top of docs, make your own package(s) for those commands and maintain that separately.

4. Refs and labels everywhere you possibly can. Also, prefixing your label names helps a lot, so \label{clouds} on a picture of clouds becomes \label{fig:clouds}. If you are writing a book, and this is the chapter on the sky, consider \label{fig:sky:clouds}.

Awesome. Can you point to a repository with an example?

Also, is there a book that you would recommend for learning LaTeX?

Overleaf has several examples that are not bad. I am currently working on a book and the Krantz template is a pretty decent example of how you might structure things (although the package itself is total spaghetti). The ACM and IEEE paper examples are also both OK, but are short so they cut some corners.

I'm not sure if there is a good book on LaTeX, ironically.

I've always used memoir.

The publisher wanted krantz. It's very pretty, but I wouldn't self-publish with it.

Regarding point 2, would that mean you’d suggest using a newline instead of a space to separate sentences?

TeX is old and busted; Typst is the new hotness. Written in Rust, too!

"Written in Rust" matters to very few customers of your office webapp. And you should add that it is $8/month for an online platform, not free or self-hosted.

What? Typst is open source and has a CLI, it's not just an online app.

I think the previous author is confused because if you google "Typst", you end up at https://typst.app, which seems to only advertise the web GUI and not the open-source CLI tool.

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