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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693

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That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for equations and figures.

That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users use it because of that!

Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is actually fantastic.

TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.

A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people actually know it exists.

Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still appreciate that they have a long battery life.

But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.

> That's not why people use LaTeX.

Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this feature, too.)

Computer Modern is the very last thing I will ever want in a document and is the first thing I change in every LaTeX document I create. It is easily one of the ugliest fonts ever created.

It has a lot of good things going for it, but it is the least attractive font that I think I have ever seen.

I think it's quite attractive, but its attractiveness isn't really why it's desirable; it's because people know it is the font used by proper fancy scientific papers. It's like the opposite of Comic Sans.

Typst has some of the microtypography features already built-in and enabled by default, like overhang (character protrusion).

And there's another microtype PR open, by the reporter of the linked issue (nice!)

This might be one of the areas where it takes a lot of effort to catch up with LaTex.

The microtype user manual shows how much thought has gone into it: https://mirror.foobar.to/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/microtype...

How is that pdf made interactive? It has options to toggle the behaviour, which work even in an in browser pdf viewer. I did not think PDFs could do that.

PDFs can do a lot more than show static content. There was one time where Adobe strongly advocated for PDF to be the page format of what would come to be called "The World Wide Web". Where we have HTML now, Adobe wanted PDF. Thankfully that did not happen. But I suspect it would have made more sense technically than [whatever this mess is that we have now.]

A lot of things are possible in PDF.

It’s cool, but using these features severely limits the portability of your document.

These interactive links did not work for me (using Linux) in the in-browser reader in Brave nor in sioyek, but they did work in evince.

Good question. The github url is printed on the first page.

I find some stuff like this.. is it raw pdf directives? Literally an example of something typst can't do right now. I also can't read this.

``` \def\mt@toggle@sample#1{% \pdfstartlink user{/Subtype/Link /BS << /Type/Border/W 1 /S/D /D[4 1] >> /H/O /C[0.65 0.04 0.07] /Contents(Click to Toggle #1!) %/OC << /Type/OCMD /VE[/Not \csname mt@_compatibility@\endcsname] >> % not honoured by older viewers anyway /A << /S/SetOCGState /State[/Toggle \csname mt@#1@true\endcsname \csname mt@#1@false\endcsname] >>} #1 \hfill\pdfendlink & \mt@layer{#1true}{\rlap{on}}\mt@layer{#1false}{off}} ```

Didn't work with Unicode the last time I checked... Would much rather have Unicode support than microtype.

I've been using microtype with lualatex, fontspec and Opentype fonts for years.

What doesn't work?

Had to use xelatex (don't remember why currently).

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