Comment by HiPhish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HiPhish | Hacker News Reader

I have written a couple of lecture notes in LaTeX and I wrote my master's thesis (mathematics) in LaTeX as well[1]. It's actually a fine language if all you want to do is write and rely on other people's templates. But actually writing my own package or understand how the underlying systems work has always seemed like black magic where individual packages have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, or add specific workarounds. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the impression I got.

It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that makes actually layout and designing the document approachable. I have only used it once for a quick one-off experiment and I did like the language, but as I have said above the language is not the problem if you just want to write text.

[1] That's not quite true, actually. I first wrote my thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc to generate the LaTeX and subsequent PDF. This allowed me to get started without having to write a lengthy preamble first. Then after I had more than half of it written down and had a good idea of what I wanted the document to look like did I clean up the generated LaTeX, adjust the formatting to my needs, redid the drawing in TikZ, and then kept writing LaTeX from there. I still think the language is not the problem, but it's easy to get hung up in the design phase before even the first chapter is written.

I also haven't delved too deep into Typst, but I can say that in my experience, writing templates involves way less black magic than LaTeX. I feel like I'm already more proficient and making my own structures with it than with LaTeX despite using LaTeX for a decade

> It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that makes actually layout and designing the document approachable

Those goals fall way out of the scope of LaTeX (and of course of Typst). If you want to have more control and power into a document's design, there's ConTeXt - as a graphic designer I just love it and can't imagine myself replacing it with LaTeX or Typst.

But as you said, if you want to concentrate on writing your text without thinking too much about its design, LaTeX or Typst are great for that.

I disagree with it being outside the scope of typst. Typst makes designing a template entirely feasible, I've tried and succeeded.

I have hear of ConTeXt, but never tried it. I originally wanted to write my resume in LaTeX, but I quickly realized that my choice was either to use a template and have a resume that looks like everyone else's, or dig deeply into the arcane working of TeX. In the end I had my sister do it in InDesign, but now she is the only one who can update it. I would love to remake it in something I can actually edit myself, whether ConTeXt, Typst or Sile.

I really think Context is the correct starting point if you want to make your own thing with the Tex quality. So many people frustrated that Latex makes it kinda hard to customize things and I was too. There is a learning curve to use the advanced features of Context but at least it feels like a sane system (and generally no need to add packages, the power to change the style of your document is fully granted to you).

I also have written. thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc to make a latex file and then latexmk to make a PDF file from it. I also used matplotlib and Python to make PDF plots, which I then could losslessly embed into the main document.

Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because you can use latex in your Pandoc template and reStructuredText is very powerful to begin with, compared to most if not all Markdown dialects for example. I think it might have been easy to continue writing reStructuredText, instead of latex.

> Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because you can use latex in your Pandoc template and reStructuredText is very powerful to begin with, compared to most if not all Markdown dialects for example. I think it might have been easy to continue writing reStructuredText, instead of latex.

Honestly I can't remember, it has been seven years since. I don't think I was aware that I could add LaTeX inside the reStructuredText, or maybe that wasn't a feature at that time. Or maybe the formulas were too complex to express in reSturedText (my topic was differential geometry). I think my main reason was that I did want control over the final layout and I wanted to add drawings in TikZ because that way the fonts in the image would match exactly the fonts in the text.

You footnote really describes why latex was not fine.

I recently wrote a thesis in typst. I have written other thesis in latex.

In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex.

I don't need that for typst.

If typst can avoid enshittifaction over the next years, then I will stay with them.

The nice thing about Typst is that I think they've built up a community and business model that should disincentivize enshittification. The compiler is open source, and there's a large number of people using it now. If they start enshittifying, it can just be forked and maintained by the community at the very least at the level of functionality it's currently at, which is good enough for a large segment of people.

You can still write in markdown and use pandoc to create typst.

> In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex.

Sure, but if you want to just _write_ then latex is just fine. I don’t understand why you had to write in markdown?

Because standard constructions like emphasize, code blocks, headers, lists etc. Are incredibly difficult to both read and write hampering the writing flow a lot.

Both markdown and typst solves this.

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