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Comment by elashri | Hacker News Reader

The killer features of LaTeX that does not let me go with typst (Although I like my typst generated resume) as an academic are.

1. Beamer, I create multiple slide decks per week and the out of the box setup that beamer provides with different styles and fonts for different needs are unmatched. The efforts to generate some of this on typst is not there yet.

2. Generating figures using tikz and be able to modify it on the source file. Because I don't bear using GUI tools. And now life is easier that LLM can help you with complex tikz generation.

3. Not that it is actually a point but I am used now to overleaf and I have professional account as CERN member. It is also better on collaboration level and features than typst cloud.

I hope that one day typst will grow into this direction so that I can stop using LaTeX. Until then I have couple of overleaf templates generated for my use.

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Maybe you have already checked these, but in case you haven't: - https://touying-typ.github.io/ Creating slides in Typst - https://cetz-package.github.io/ CeTZ is a package that allows for drawing with Typst with an API inspired by TikZ and Processing. It also provides plotting and chart libraries and is used in several other packages to create circuit, fretboard and more diagrams - maybe try getting your team to use version control? You may this that it's a lost cause, but existing version control schemes (like git) work very great for textual formats, including with LaTeX or Typst

These are great suggestions, but did I understand that suggest git as an alternative to overleaf? That's... not at all reasonable, as well as completely missing what problems overleaf solves for which people. Overleaf ist git und the hood. But what it really provides is Google Docs style collaboration on Latex documents.

Reviewing the changes I review in Overleaf in GitHub pull requests would be incredibly painful and introduce a completely new, convoluted and unintuitive (until you're used to it) workflow for collaborative editing.

FWIW, there is an open-source collaborative editor for Typst that was posted a couple of weeks ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45481791

In the Typst web app, you can link a project to a Git repository. This way you can have real-time collaboration in the web app, and versioning through Git. It's not the same as Overleaf's history GUI, but it's functional.

If you make a lot of slides with latex, then it is definitely worth it to try typst. I have a lot of presentations in latex for lectures and such things, with many animated tikz figures. But the compilation times are huge. At some point it is very time consuming to iterate. With typst, it compiles so fast that you don't have to fear to start a compilation. I finish my presentations much faster now.

Cetz has been working very good for me. I was really unsure that it could replace tikz for my applications. But apparently, as long as you have good geometrical primitives (lines, rectangle, circles, etc) you can do a lot. Also it is much nicer to program and make real functions with typst. It is true, the typst options to replace beamer are still not quite there in comparison, but they are definitely in a very useful state. See for example typst-presentate [1].

[1] https://github.com/pacaunt/typst-presentate

One thing I'm missing when making slides with typst is the ability to show short videos or animated gifs. Although to be fair this isn't easy in beamer either.

Typst can actually include gifs, but they don't move for me. I have some hopes that perhaps one could make slides straight in html which could alleviate the issue.

Maybe you can use Touying Exporter: https://github.com/touying-typ/touying-exporter

> [1]

There is one example with Fletcher... I find these also nice: https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher

Some quick remarks:

1) I have been using typst to create slides with some success. Adding special features tends to be simpler than in beamer.

2) cetz (https://github.com/cetz-package/cetz) works quite well and is comparable to tikz in complexity and capability. of course, there is more support for tikz, but it is bound to improve over time.

It was easy for me to roll my own slideshow tool in Typst. I would have never attempted this in LaTeX.

Can't respond to 2 or 3. Used tikz once. I wish there were a de facto programmatic drawing tool (I usually resort to graphviz or matplotlib), but there are a bunch of 80% solutions.

To add on what's been said already on slide decks, another great slide creation package in Typst is touying[1]. I've used it to create my own academic theme[2] for courses or conference presentations.

[1] https://touying-typ.github.io/ [2] https://typst.app/universe/package/touying-unistra-pristine/

As someone who generates mathematical content as their job

1. Touying

2. Cetz. Personally I think that LLMs are pretty bad at Tikz. I know you said you don't like GUI tools but Inkscape is great

3. github >>> overleaf

1 and 2 are already in the typst ecosystem. What you really need is a professional account as CERN member,on Typst.

> 1 and 2 are already in the typst ecosystem

No they are not already there. As others replied, there are somethings similar but not the same feature completeness. I was specific to talk about beamer not saying "slides" in general.

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