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Comment by deppep | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX is not "old trash". It's one of the best piece of software ever written. Just don't import bs in your document.

I’d argue that Typst probably beats it on all levels. Have you ever seen a LaTeX document? (The question is rhetorical, of course you have) Just because it was the best thing before doesn’t mean it still is now. I’d say the only thing it still has going for it is momentum.

I looked at the Typst documentation and from what I could tell, it has 3 hard-coded "Modes" for 3 hard-coded kinds of syntax (normal, math, code). I couldn't find any way to add any custom syntax - is there a way to do this?

Tex/LaTeX are completely syntactically extensible. For example, a logician might want to use the software with any number of their notations, or a physicist drawing Feynmann diagrams, etc. I think at one point Lillypad used it for typesetting sheet music.

Edit: i found it! https://typst.app/docs/guides/guide-for-latex-users/#package...

I hated most Latex syntactic extensions that I ever has to deal with. They basically force you to learn completly different languages, each with their own quirks. I found simple function-looking macros to most often be more intuitive and reliable.

Inside certain boundaries, you can define custom markup syntax in a way, including abbreviations or more scary regex matching style rules.

But code syntax can not be changed an no you can't redefine if @ is a letter or not and flip flop that in your code like latex does.

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