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Comment by kkfx | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX is not just a set of macros over TeX to produce (nowadays) some pdf, it's a very big library of ready-to-use packages for pretty anything, that's VERY hard to "substitute".

You want inspiration for some strange table layouts? There are gazillion ready made; some graph? TiKz/PGF have gazillions of ready made examples... Want a programming language in the middle? Python, Lua etc can be embedded straight away.

So far I've seen few tentative to "replace or hide LaTeX", from the old DocBook to ConTeXt, no one succeed simply because of all the LaTeX already made and easy to import. Having alternatives, especially seen the actual "fragmented" development is nice, but honestly I doubt it can take off. Proprietary products are fast to wane in popularity if a serious competitor pops up because the users does not own them, FLOSS are much calmer since anyone can grab a piece and integrate ideas of someone else without the need to switch.

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> Want a programming language in the middle? Python, Lua etc can be embedded straight away.

After using templating languages in Python, yes, I always want this when using LaTeX. And as of ~2 years ago when I last tried this, while sure, I could embed Python in the middle, the interface for interacting with LaTeX via the embedded Python was anemic enough to be not useful. Maybe something had changed in the last 2 years, but if so, it's not more mature.

Example: I wanted to have a daily meditation book, where \chapter{Title} would insert the dates in order with the title of the meditation, instead of chapter numbers, also inserting a table of contents entry with the dates. What I didn't want was to have to go through and change dates if I added a meditation in the middle, or swapped the order of meditations. I'm not picky, I would've been happy to use \section{Title} or \meditation{Title}, or script a solution.

What happened was I spent probably 6 hours of research and never found a solution integrated into LaTeX. I did eventually write a script in Python that naively parsed the chapter titles and changed them in-placed in the LaTeX code, but that meant I had to regenerate the dates as a separate task.

Note that this took me about 5 minutes to figure out with Typst's integrated scripting language.

Exactly. It's not too difficult to imagine replacing LaTeX for some fairly straight-forward documents. But just by casually browsing tex.stackexchange.com, you'll soon find out that people use LaTeX for an amazingly wide range of different things, and it's capable of serving many, many edge cases very well. To be on par with that is a very hard goal. Let's not forget, LaTeX has been around forever, and consequently has grown into an incredible complex and varied ecosystem.

I mean, the same is true for Emacs. But that hasn't stopped other editors (e.g. VSCode) from developing large vibrant communities of users and tooling.

But Emacs isn't a requirement by half the STEM research community, LaTeX is.

Typst is not replacing LaTeX in general and should stop advertising being a LaTeX replacement. It isn't a competitor.

Not everything revolves around scientific journals and their archaic rules. For my team Typst was a perfect LaTeX replacement and we've been happy ever since we switched. It is easier to understand, has faster compile times and is more powerful without enabling shell escape. However, we're not in the business of writing scientific papers, we write technical reports for our customers. If it wasn't advertised as a LaTeX replacement, we might never have found out about it.

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