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Comment by __mharrison__ | Hacker News Reader

Cool. I've moved on to typst and hope to never touch latex again in my lifetime...

After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is open enough to try WYSWYG.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152982

To save people’s time: this thing is not LaTeX and you won’t be able to use any of the LaTeX packages that you need if you are preparing a manuscript for a journal (for example).

I recently had good luck writing a paper in org-mode. The .tex export has been around forever but I never really played with it - unlike other Emacs users, I don't actually use org-mode that much.

But in the end, it worked surprisingly well. Mind you, I didn't have anything too fancy in the paper (no figures, minipages, tikz, etc...), so that made the task very easy. But it was a good workflow:

  - Write org-mode text in left buffer.
  - Have Emacs issue a .tex export on save.
  - Have the document automatically compile when .tex files are newer than the .pdf file
  - Have the right buffer show and automatically reload the pdf file.

That made it so I could just write stuff in the left buffer and on save, the pdf in the right buffer would update and reflect the last changes. I found that a quite pleasant setup.

With typst its fast enough to update the pdf/png/svg preview while you are typing, instead of waiting 0.x seconds when hitting save :)

Yeah, I know, it's pretty cool... because, frankly, who's got that much time to waste??

I've recently made a dozen vastly different projects with Typst, ALL of which would have created dependency hell, syntax noise, and hours of extra pointless work in Latex. It's such a clear win at this point it's embarrassing.

reminds me of when LyX became trendy with a small group of optimists.

LyX is cool but it was still just on top of TeX. typst is much more fundamental.

LyX is pretty great. It has an equation editor that actually works very well - once you learn it it's much nicer than typing in the raw LaTeX.

If I had to use LaTeX, I'd definitely do it via LyX.

I mean, LyX has met my needs since 2019 - I don't particularly need to be optimistic about it. I was even able to bring in parts of my old LaTeX preamble with me, especially some utility macros. It was a pretty painless switch with immediate benefit.

(I've done everything in it from write honors theses and format CVs.)

I've been interested in Typst. But beyond report generation (which I avoid in general), I don't really have a general "document processing" tool, but multiple specialized ones, and given Typst's current jack of all trades/master of none status, I'm not sure what it'll replace. I use Quarto for a lot of my statistical computing, LyX if I need to do a lot of finicky math typesetting (e.g. if I need to break out \qquad), and Word - god forbid - for my non-technical collaborators.

I've also started using typst for some projects. I am slowly getting used to the syntax. But it's a process for me. I also still have latex projects/docs

So happy to see new texlive as well

Typst lacks PGF/TikZ alternative.

https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz

Interesting, thanks. Looks quite promising.

Worth noting that LLMs are very bad at writing cetz code, even if you try to feed them all the docs. I had to use TiKZ and import the resulting PDFs for some of the more complex illustrations in my thesis.

I imagine that will change quickly. A year ago LLMs were horrible at polars code. They are decent now.

Stared typst ages ago. Thanks for the reminder to try it out. Now the cost of switching is so low too

Switched about 3 Years ago, never looked back. Its a happy place.

After delivering my thesis in LaTeX, I never bothered with it again, even at CERN back in 2003 most folks were using a mixture of Word and FrameMaker, with templates to have a TeX like paper output.

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