Typst: Finally a Solid LaTeX Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Typst: Finally a Solid LaTeX Alternative

all-dressed-programming.com

I'm definitely rooting for Typst and other LaTeX replacements, but the factors resisting a change are massive, especially in academia. Conferences and journals all have templates in LaTex that have been built up over years or decades. The ecosystem of packages is huge. Finally, LaTeX documents look really good when done correctly. Especially in academia were paper review is a largely subjective process, something as simple as poor typesetting can spoil a reviewer's perception of the work.

> Finally, LaTeX documents look really good when done correctly.

If I'm honest, this is probably the biggest thing that drew me to LaTeX (over 20 years ago). Typset documents just look way better and more professional. There's reference and citation management which is huge obviously, but it's still most important that it looks good. As long as it's possible to learn, the exact syntax is very distant in the list of reasons I use LaTeX. And honestly I'm not swayed by claims that something is "modern" or whatever.

I don't really want to judge Typst, I'm not familiar with it, I only want to observe that the linked site doesn't focus on the output and doesn't show any examples, it just makes a bunch of technical claims about things that are far less important to me, even if they're locally interesting. Which makes me feel like it's going to be a tough sell.

Edit: also it appears to be an online SaaS which is a nonstarter for me anyway. I figured it would be in Rust...

Post author here. Typst if first and foremost a CLI. You can install it via cargo or other package managers such as nix.

There is saas application too with obviously the team is trying to push and perhaps moneytize in the future. From the success overleaf has obtained, clearly a saas is mandatory at this point.

If you are looking for example of outputs, the tutorial is concise and explicit.

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