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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Is this a LaTeX killer yet?

As long as I don't have to submit a paper, I always use Typst nowadays for PDF generation. So for me that answer is a yes. (I also wrote my PhD thesis in typst and the thesis was accepted.)

Out of curiosity, what was the thesis about? Can you share the PDF?

Predicting dropout in special forces selection.

Yes I (semi) wasted some time to setup a repository including CI: https://thesis.huijzer.xyz/. Link to source code and pdf are on that site. I hope it can satisfy your curiosity :p

Thanks, I’ve read the first part, it’s interesting that there’s no difference between selected candidates and dropouts. Also, pretty nice example of typist :)

It's definitely an excellent example of complex but real typst code. Thanks for sharing!

Probably not for scientific publishing until journals and conferences provide Typst templates as they do with LaTeX. I wish it will happen, to be honest it would be great to get rid of LaTeX. It's old and it shows a lot, a replacement is long overdue.

I've migrated everything I did in LaTeX to Typst. Books (I've written 12 books), invoicing, slides, and handouts. Happy to never touch LaTeX again.

How's the typesetting and justification nowadays? Last time I committed to it for a few months I found the latter to be about the quality of HTML with a better linebreak algorithm.

They implemented the same algorithm that TeX uses.

No, they are not using the same algorithm: https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/layout-models/

I thought we were talking about justification, there it is using it: https://github.com/typst/typst/discussions/626

If I weren't on mobile I'd link you to the line in the source code. Just search the repo for Knuth-Plass.

I'm aware it uses the same algorithm, but the end result is still worse. Before Typst, I tried typesetting in HTML in an effort to escape LaTeX, and the results I got using an implementation of this same algorithm was very similar to what Typst ended up achieving, which is noticeably worse than LaTeX.

Mind you, I loved programming in Typst, and I wrote some plugins before it got its package manager, but I ended up moving back to LaTeX for this difference in quality of the final output. I should do some in depth testing at some point, because I am looking to switch back.

I'm using it for pretty much all new document generation tasks that are targeted to PDF, and it's very low fuss. Takes under 2 seconds to generate a 1600 page planner PDF with embedded images on many pages. I'd suggest giving it a try, unless you need certain journal templates.

The library of journal templates in the Typst universe is growing day by day. A much bigger issue is some of these journals not yet accepting Typst submissions.

Mostly. The inability to include pdf figures is an annoyance that forces a change in workflow compared to tex. That and needing to submit .tex files for journal publication.

You can include PDF figures with the muchpdf package: https://typst.app/universe/package/muchpdf

From a technical perspective, yes. From a social perspective, maybe. It needs a lot more community support and adoption, but it's on an excellent trajectory.

AFAIK, Typst doesn’t handle multilanguage documents well, and hyphenation in particular. I had to go back to XeTeX because of this.

Totally.

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