Typst is the modern LaTeX.
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For all the well-deserved complaints about TeX's and LaTeX's syntax, Typst only makes this worse, by repurposing even more characters as markup.
I don't think this was ever my issue with Latex, which instead are mostly:
- the cryptic error messages and infinite logs
- the unintuitive ways to do stuff like store a value for later use or sum two lengths
- the very long compile times
- the amount of reliance on global state from various packages, which contributes to even more cryptic errors or weird behavior when something goes wrong
- various other quirks, e.g. the fact you often need to end a line with a comment or the newline will skrew up your content.
You forgot the of syntax that is latex. Very hard to read. (Worked with it for 20 years)
Typst on the other hand is inherently readable.
I could deal with all of the other issues if it weren't for the absurdly long compile times. I wonder where most of that time is spent.
Some is spent on optimizing the results on the paragraph, page, and multi-page level: river elimination, color balance, widow and orphan elimination, etc. I don't know how much of this Typst does; certainly HTML + CSS does none of it.
I'll put my finger on the perceived weak point: Which characters? Are they listed somewhere?
Sure: the Typst syntax is detailed here: https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/
The non-control characters of ASCII are largely characters you might actually want to put in a document. TeX uses some of these as markup, e.g., the dollar sign to bracket maths mode and the ampersand as a column separator in tables. Typst takes this much further, using plus and minus signs to introduce list items, at signs for references, and so on.
Ideally, all visible characters should produce themselves in the printed output, except for the backslash introducing control sequences that represent all of the markup and braces for delimiting the extent of parameters to those control sequences. This would produce a very predictable and easily-parsed syntax.
Typst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I prefer using it.
But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement. The ecosystem is also larger.
I have LaTex documents I struggle to convert.
Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars.
Also, typst is just really good.
> Also, typst is just really good.
Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a powerful enough tool. For example:
- Boxes & named figures
- Footnotes
- Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files)
- Comments
- Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of contents)
- Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.)
I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today. Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I don't want to manually add <p> tags around my paragraphs like a savage.)
Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!
Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu.
When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.
LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly".
(Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM.
Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt.
Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more.
I'm sure you remember that quite clearly.
Latex is not a company’s product. That’s a substantial difference.
When you are the only option marketing doesn't matter.
I would suspect (based on my own experience) is that the reason folks shout "typst!" anytime they hear latex is that the user experience is 1000x better than latex.
IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.
there definitely is. check any math or even cs department in universities
Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693
That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for equations and figures.
That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users use it because of that!
Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is actually fantastic.
> That's not why people use LaTeX.
Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this feature, too.)
TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.
Computer Modern is the very last thing I will ever want in a document and is the first thing I change in every LaTeX document I create. It is easily one of the ugliest fonts ever created.
It has a lot of good things going for it, but it is the least attractive font that I think I have ever seen.
But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.
Typst has some of the microtypography features already built-in and enabled by default, like overhang (character protrusion).
And there's another microtype PR open, by the reporter of the linked issue (nice!)
This might be one of the areas where it takes a lot of effort to catch up with LaTex.
The microtype user manual shows how much thought has gone into it: https://mirror.foobar.to/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/microtype...
Didn't work with Unicode the last time I checked... Would much rather have Unicode support than microtype.
I've been using microtype with lualatex, fontspec and Opentype fonts for years.
What doesn't work?
Asciidoc is also a good alternative.
Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements?
Major problems include:
- Tables are a huge pain.
- Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful.
- Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should give you bold and italic, but such composability was not happening for a some functions.
-Mixing of physical and logical formatting.
-Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.
The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else.
Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)
Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.
“Pricing”, “Sign Up”
Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach.
There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.
Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer) but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net negative contributors to free software.
So... yeah.
> 0 of you pay
That is an overly broad generalization.
> no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc.
Again, an overly broad generalization.
I am unsure what kind of conclusion you can objectively make out of such generic statements.
Absolutely agree! Money only becomes an issue when someone asks for it politely. And then people ask why such efforts and projects die in the shadows.
They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it
They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
> sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.
Almost all of typst, except their web app, is available on crates.io and from many Linux distribution repositories. And you can skip the web app if you don't prefer it. There's no loss of functionality.
To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
I find today much easier to contribute to (in the open source sense) than latex. Go to the GitHub and interact with the developers. Who happen to be very responsive.
I used latex for 20+ years and don't know how to file a bug for latex. Do I do it for xelatex, latex? Where? How do I update things? Download 4 gigs? Where's to documentation? Where's a book that explains how to contribute to latex? These are some of the issues I've dealt with and am happy to never have to again.
Does it have better/easier tables. Does it support complex tables like with images in it, with alternating horizontal or vertical text in cells, tables inside tables, tables with alternative row/column shading, etc while still supporting automatic wrapping to contents, etc?
I recall a recent criticism of Typst being that it doesn't strip unused glyphs from fonts when making PDFs so they end up excessively large compared to other solutions. Has there been any change to that?
That's fixed, thanks to a community contribution! [1] For what it's worth, Typst did have font subsetting from the start, but it was rather bad for CFF-flavoured OpenType fonts.
The same contributor has recently put a lot work into building a better foundation for Typst's PDF export [1], which decreases file sizes further, and brings many further benefits.
I live in fear that one of the major typesetting services like Overleaf will convince people to move away from a very durable standard and adopt something that’s much more change-oriented. Then we’ll all have to learn not one, but two standards. Rinse repeat.
It seems to have a bus factor of 1.