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Comment by ossner | Hacker News Reader

The crucial component for the success of this, in my opinion, is the acceptance of Typst templates in scientific journals and conferences. The adoption of something like this in universities relies entirely on the adoption by these publishers.

I see almost no support in the scientific community for Typst since everyone already has a LaTeX template for a thesis, paper, slides, etc. Researchers need to take the initiative and create a template that is accepted by first a chair, then propagate it in the university and try and get it popular enough so that it hopefully forces the creation of templates for conferences and journals.

This is an incredibly long, tedious, (and I am guessing ongoing) process, but one that is crucial for Typst to be a real contender with LaTeX

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I'm probably ignorant to specific issues that make more advanced typesetting for journal submissions necessary, but I don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the standard. I'd advocate for that before either LaTeX or Typst.

I absolutely get the importance of typesetting for people who publish physical books/magazines/etc, but when it comes to research I don't see the value of typsetting anything. Journals or print publishers should be responsible for typsetting submissions to fit their style/paper size/etc, and researchers should just be responsible for delivering their research in a format that's simpler and more content focused.

> I don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the standard

I would argue that is exactly what LaTeX is... I studied mathematics in university, and from what I recall, every major publisher provided a LaTeX template for articles and textbooks. Likewise, pretty much every mathematics presentation uses Beamer slides, and most mathematicians are able to "compile" subsets of LaTeX in their head. Websites like MSE and MO use MathJax precisely so that people can write notation as they would on assignments, notes, papers, etc.

Note: I am not saying people particularly like LaTeX as a tool. However, the vast majority of the complaints about LaTeX do seem to be from computer science people. Many mathematics students just create an Overleaf (formerly ShareLaTeX) account and call it a day. Of course, nobody enjoys notes taking 10 seconds to compile, or the first 100 lines of their thesis being a preamble, but the important part is the ability to express notation across a variety of mediums, and the publisher support (as GP mentioned).

I agree the standard for mathematical notation is latex, but it’s only needed for fairly limited parts of a document. It makes more sense to me as something you’d use in snippets like `$\sum_{n=1}^{10}n$` than something that should control the whole document.

Markdown and mathjax is imo way more web friendly than a full latex document and avoids distracting/unnecessary aspects of latex.

As for publisher support, that’s what frustrates me most: html was specifically designed for academics at cern to publish and link documents. Instead of using an html friendly format like markdown, publishers demand a format designed for printing content to a physical piece of paper. So now html is used for almost everything except academic papers, and academic papers are all pdfs submitted to journal or preprint severs with no links.

That's exactly what Quarto is, and there are already a handful of good journal templates for Quarto to choose from.

https://quarto.org/docs/journals/

We don't want to do this because LaTeX already solves our problems quite well.

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