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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

After reading Laurenz's blog post on TeX vs Typst layout [1], it made me wonder: how hard would it be at this point for them to make Typst directly understand TeX, and let you insert chunks of TeX. It would make for a really nice upgrade path. Of course, being bug-for-bug compatible once people layer on tons of TeX packages seems like a losing game. But if most straightforward TeX stuff "just worked", it would be an easy way to upgrade one paragraph at a time…

[1] https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/layout-models/

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There is a Typst package called MiTeX that supports at least some basic TeX input.

[1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex

Oh, wow. That's fantastic!

> There is a Typst package called MiTeX that supports at least some basic TeX input.

I can see that being useful for lots of people, but, as a migration path (as I understood your parent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43106837 to suggest), I don't think it would work. I've worked with TeX for almost 30 years and used vim for about 20 years, and suspect that "supports … some basic TeX" is likely to have the same effect for me as something that emulates vim does on a master-level vimmer—falling into the uncanny valley that's somehow worse than a totally different thing.

>let you insert chunks of TeX

Honestly a better first step would be getting inserting another pdf plot to work, but seems hard https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145

Tl;dr it's because they don't want to neglect the other output formats PNG and SVG. For those they'd have to render the PDF, for which there is apparently no satisfactory rust package.

and there's no nice way to insert PDF using WebASM, which is their first-tier support and monetization platform (i.e. 1st party Overleaf)

> no satisfactory rust package

I'm seeing this delay lots of features in rust projects.

For example helix the text editor hasn't gotten file watching (for the purposes of updating after external edits) for years now because of apparent problems with the file watching library in rust.

Typst's file watching seems to work excellent since 0.12, though.

Did you try the MuchPDF package mentioned near the bottom of that discussion? It seems to do the job for what I tried.

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