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Comment by tinthedev | Hacker News Reader

I'm not quite sure who this is for.

Markdown is for keeping things simple.

There's plenty of of "proper" markup languages and full programming languages to actually write code in.

Why do we need a hybrid program like this, which is not as simple as pure markup, and is not as powerful as a proper templating language?

I personally just run markdown -> HTML/CSS -> python templating (Jinja or something) -> PDF/HTML

As a dev, I find this works the best for me. But I also cannot imagine that learning Quarkdown would improve my workflow meaningfully, and I also cannot imagine recommending someone learn such a niche product instead of having them learn HTML/CSS and Python (Jinja if they need fancy). Seems like a comparable amount of effort.

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This is for academic and publication journals.

Which is why you see Typst it's strongest competitor in the Comparison Chart.

as an academic I don't see myself using this because I don't see my co-authors using this.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

I'll wait until after tenure.

Every conference has their own required LaTeX style file that must be used. Unless there is an automated way to convert these exactly, I don't see how LaTeX alternatives can be used.

Is LaTeX difficult to learn? An article stated something about how its syntax is inscrutable, from what memory will allow before the caffeine hits.

It's hell. You usually use an existing layout and adapt it to your needs, but even that can be counter intuitive.

Source : wrote my MLaw papers with it.

What's the problem with making your own layouts? just the syntax?

llms are great at handling syntax for you so you can focus on your work

I never wrote latex before, but writing a simple PDF / scholarly article from code is pretty easy with current tools if you're a dev

> writing a simple PDF / scholarly article from code is pretty easy with current tools

I tripped over a lot of abandonware while looking for a free OSS HTML->PDF solution, recently. What do you recommend?

I settled using latex with tectonic, you could always leverage playwright or similar for easy html -> print to pdf without any weird libs? (not great startup time, but you can batch many ops in one session)

# justfile ── put in repo root set shell := ["bash", "-cu"] # one shell → predictable env, pipe-fail, etc.

# Build a PDF once pdf: tectonic -X compile src-v0.1/main.tex --outdir target/pdf # or swap for typst

# Clean artefacts clean: rm -rf target

# Live-reload while writing watch: cargo watch -q -x 'just pdf'

then i just split the paper in sections like react components but using tex

main.tex

\documentclass{article}

\input{preamble}

\begin{document} \maketitle

\input{sections/abstract}

\input{sections/introduction}

\input{sections/syntax}

\input{sections/evaluation}

\input{sections/conclusion}

\end{document}

Depends on the user. Basic LaTeX2e/LuaTeX can be learned over 5 days. Guru level like any programming language needs its 10K hours. There are people who have an aversion for backlashes. The main reason for the "\" is perhaps the only char that is not commonly found in texts. Others like ":" re very common in texts. When parsing LaTeX and behind it is Knuth's original TeX engine, the commands are swimming in a sea of text (as the Dragon book says).

One thing that has helped with ease of use is Overleaf. It is a hosted LaTeX editor with lots of collaboration features (leaving comments, history of edits) that let people collaborate in real time on a paper. It comes with many templates to get you started on a new document. If you're working with collaborators, it has a lock on the market.

LaTeX itself can be easy for simple things (pick a template, and put text in each section). And it can grow into almost anything if you put in enough effort. It is far and away the standard way to write math equations, so if your document has lots of formulas, that's a plus.

I think that might be true at some maths and computer science meetings but is unheard of in other scientific fields.

It's the standard in most hard science fields. Also common in some humanities, too.

Can I ask which humanities?

I'm probably showing my bias here, but I'm (respectfully) surprised that, say, poets would want to work in LaTeX :)

Linguistics and many of its subbranches. Historians, archaeologists and to be honest LaTeX is great for poetry.

CS strongly prefers LaTeX [0,1] while broader journals and conferences prefer MS Word over it [2,3]. As long as there is not a solid infrastructure for these other typesetting systems, I never saw the appeal. I think for internal company reports they do have their uses, but other than that, why not use the LaTeX or Word? Realistically any person wanting to submit a work will know how to work with either one or the other.

I also don't see the need for journals and conferences to make a typst template for exactly these reasons. The templates will have to be community-made and then you still run the risk of having a paper rejected a year from now because the template is outdated.

[0] https://conferences.miccai.org/2025/en/PAPER-SUBMISSION-GUID...

[1] https://github.com/apoorvkh/cvpr-latex-template

[2] https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/formatting-guide

[3] https://www.science.org/content/page/science-information-aut...

You make a fair point - I'm talking specifically about CS/ML/AI conferences. I shouldn't overgeneralize.

This is a general argument against any sort of innovation in this field, which is absurd.

I'm just saying that these systems don't work for me. I write ML/AI conference papers in LaTeX, and I think that use case will be tough to dislodge. I can see this being very attractive to people making other types of documents without a fixed format, especially if you don't already know LaTeX.

They should have added Quarto there imo.

It's for me, as far as I can tell! I like making PDFs.

My ideas start in Obsidian (Markdown) and then I use pandoc and add a bunch of cursed inline LaTeX hacks to the Markdown for the final product.

I guess cursed hacks are part of any workflow, but I am definitely going to check this out.

its for people who want latex but are mad that latex became c++

LaTeX also has some bizarre defaults like bitmap fonts in a tool designed to allow people to create high quality typeset documents.

which is ironic considering at one time the appeal of LaTeX was "sane defaults". Don't get me wrong. The default choices were really the best choice at some point in the past. They just no longer are.

And latex is one of very few programs where changing defaults would fundamentally undermine its very purpose (being able to recreate documents no matter how old)

This was true maybe 20 years ago, before TeX engines that output directly to PDF were created. Today, the recommended engine is LuaLaTeX, and it defaults to OpenType fonts.

Thanks for updating me. That corresponds with my own timeline where I last tried it 20 years ago.

If one just chooses a reasonable documentclass and if need be a few packages suited to the requirements of one's document, then it all "just works" with (mostly) sensible defaults and minimal configuration.

Memoir hugely simplified my own work in LaTeX back when I was doing book composition.

Or, just use LyX....

Well, you'll have to install and keep those packages somewhere on your system. And maybe a few months from now after your latex distribution got updated by the system your document suddenly no longer compiles.

What I want is something like npm-like package management for this, where the packages are just kept there next to the document. I don't care if I'll have a package 20 times on my system either, storage hasn't been a concern in many years.

> And maybe a few months from now after your latex distribution got updated by the system your document suddenly no longer compiles.

I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years. This has literally never happened to me. If that's not stability, I don't know what is. LaTeX documents I wrote in my grad days still compile for me. I just checked and it does. I do keep the dependency packages myself in my folder.

Has this issue ever happened to anyone? Why would LaTeX distribution getting updated break my documents? It's still the same latex compiler and the same base styles and packages!

The only instance of a document not working right anymore for me was a really hacked book using an early/beta version of memoir --- there were (documented) breaking changes for the final release --- updated to match the new macro calls and it was back to working in short order.

> I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years

it gets annoying when you use LaTeX once a year for 25 years.

> when you use LaTeX once a year for 25 years

That's me.

Is there any specific issue you face which stops you from compiling old files?

As I mentioned in my other comment, my grad school days documents are still compiling fine.

If you still use LaTeX 2e and you've got all the dependency packages with you, pdflatex should Just Work. right? I can't remember any major change that would outright break your compilation. And I haven't seen such issue too myself. So I genuinely want to know what specific issues you or others face that wouldn't even let you compile your document.

Not trying to argue that this happens regularly, but some recent (last 6 months or so) minted update contained breaking changes.

It happened to me because I had to use the templates and document classes provided by my university, which themselves rely on a bunch of packages I wouldn't have installed myself.

My next step was to just try doing the build in containers but I even ran into it there once because I accidentally pulled a newer image...

But it's just anecdotally. Maybe I really was holding it all wrong.

Maybe running Latex in a container would meet your requirements?

Write a Nix expression to compile your document. That way you can be sure it keeps working. I did this long ago for my PhD thesis and other papers.

There's a package for that:

https://ctan.org/pkg/collect?lang=en

> If one just chooses a reasonable documentclass and if need be a few packages suited to the requirements of one's document, then it all "just works" with (mostly) sensible defaults and minimal configuration.

Ironically, very similar to the story with modern C++. If you use a limited subset it can "just work" but only if you are disciplined and don't have to mix in legacy code that's pre-C++11.

look c++99 was a very cromulent c++ as well. oh lol just like the LaTeX story

when this tool has "FakeBold"[0] like Latex has, I'll make the switch.

[0]: https://x.com/OrganicGPT/status/1920202649481236745/photo/1

Is there something like that for Typst?

What does that actually mean? The tweet is not very clear. Is it the bold in the header? What's special about it?

I'm assuming it's emboldening text by thickening up the strokes instead of using a (possibly non-existent) bold variant of the font?

Became? When? I have latex documents written a couple decades ago that still render fine.

What happens in 10 years to all the Quarkdown documents once this fad fades away?

That's why these things don't go anywhere. If I need to write formatting details, it is better to use LaTeX which is a well-tested and stable language that will last for another 30 years.

Yet also incredible verbose and outdated

Outdated means there is something better that is now used to substitute an old technology, which is not the case for Latex. Unfortunately, programmers tend to think "outdated" just means "was created more than 5 years ago"...

Plus, with Latex you can use LLMs as assistants and they do a great job thanks to so much Latex data they've seen in training.

And at least I can be sure that any math expression can be written somehow in latex, no mater how bizarre.

Could definitely see using this for docs. We end up with HTML scattered through our markdown files whenever we need something beyond basic formatting, which is ugly. The ecosystem support is the real question though - Markdown works everywhere because it's been around forever.

> I personally just run markdown -> HTML/CSS -> python templating (Jinja or something) -> PDF/HTML

Unix philosophy vs highly integrated vertical Microsoft style applications. One benefits users, the other, the vendor.

>markdown -> HTML/CSS -> python templating (Jinja or something) -> PDF/HTML

Uh...

maybe thats why they just want markdown -> PDF/HTML

Well, but you don't have `markdown -> PDF/HTML`

Also, if you don't need the python bits, you just skip Python :)

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