Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST.

To me this seems a horrible decision at the stage of writing/structuring. I'd rather write in Markdown (this way I could just write, without bothering about typesetting) and only convert to LaTeX for publishing. I'm not proficient in LaTeX though - I once tried to learn it and it felt like learning a language of an insectoid extraterrestrial civilization - completely unintuitive, almost impossible to do anything new - what hasn't been already done by someone else enabling you just copy-paste your own text. IIRC it doesn't even have first-class Unicode support.

In LaTeX you also clearly separate structure and typesetting: you don't write \noindent\textbf{Introduction}\nobreak\medskip or whatever, but simply \section{Introduction}

Macros are also pretty easy to define \newcommand\important[1]{\textcolor{red}{#1}}

And of course it has first-class Unicode support

Easy is relative. Latex is sooo much uglier than typst:

    #let important(body) = {
      text(red, body)
    }

    But whatever you do, #important[Dont *panic*!]

Docs:

https://typst.app/docs/reference/foundations/function/

"In LaTeX you also clearly separate structure and typesetting ..." Not quite.

The rub comes in when you want to pull that content out to render it in a format that isn't meant to be camera-ready, like a Web page or an e-book. TeX, even with Leslie Lamport's LaTeX macros, doesn't give you an ergonomic mechanism for marshalling out the semantic structure of your document to reuse elsewhere.

You're left parsing the TeX yourself, and that sucks.

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