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Deyan GinevIn one day - one day! - of going open source, the Typst typesetting system passed 5,000 stars on Github.
If you ever needed evidence that there is a real hunger for a TeX replacement, this is it.
Christian Pietsch (old acct.)Have you seen a young programmer open a .sty file? And watch them transition through the 7 stages of grief?
I did that with 20+ people back in 2007-2012. It was terror-inducing even back then, and that's a decade ago.
The clock is ticking.
@dginev Why open a .sty file?
To write one.
Rob Corless@dginev @chpietsch in close to forty years of using TeX and LaTeX I have written exactly one style file, by modifying an ACM one.
The installed ecosystem of journal templates and bibliographic arcana is huge and I for one have no interest whatever in battling over typesetting. If I can push a button and convert the Maple Transactions journal template to allow authors to use Typst, great. I might even be willing to spend an hour or two (I'm retired, and learning new things is good for me). But in the end most of my authors want to publish, not to fight with software.
@3j0hn maybe if Maple could convert documents to Typst that might help.
Oh certainly. You won't find me trying to *move* people out of LaTeX, especially seasoned practitioners comfortable with it.
But I can tell you that there is a generational gap, which is likely to keep widening.
My day job today is to help with developing (yet-another) unofficial clone of TeX by rewriting LaTeXML in Rust. I can tell you that people like *me* are suffering in propagating the arcane software perspectives of the 1980s. Which is also the decade I was born in. We can make some small things better as-is, but large paradigm improvements - like the ones Typst is attempting - would be really great to see.
John May@rcorless @dginev @chpietsch "You can take away my overfull hbox warnings when you pry them from my cold dead hands."
0xDE@3j0hn @rcorless @dginev @chpietsch More easily, you can take away your overfull hbox warnings by \usepackage{microtype}.
The strength of LaTeX is not its syntax; it is its huge installed base of packages and styles.
@dginev @chpietsch @3j0hn I will add that Richard Hamming observed that improving on a local optimum (he was talking about the standard calculus textbook) requires a really massive change. He was correct, of course. But that scares people away, and if your new and improved thing is too scary, it won't be adopted. You are very right to be looking at that initial "oomph" of takeup. Get enough people on board and it will become the new thing. If not, well, it will join Hamming's textbook (which is fabulous, by the way)
@rcorless @dginev @chpietsch This is definitely something I can look into. It might be possible to leverage our current .mw -> .ipynb converter, but that is more focused on "worksheet" type documents rather than ones with rich formatting. I'll add it to my tall stack of side projects to explore.
@rcorless @dginev I took a look at Typst. It looks nice! But, the non-standard math formatting (https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/) means writing a new math expression converter (rather than leveraging the Latex or MathML converters directly). It makes a converter higher effort, so I'll probably wait and see what kind of legs Typst gets in the near future.
Jakob Voß@chpietsch @dginev I bet someone is already writing a Markdown-with-custom-tags to Typst converter 🤔
mathew@chpietsch @dginev There's also ConTeXt, which has the typesetting of LaTeX but makes it far easier to do things like page layout.
Frederik Elwert@dginev Still have to try it out, but I'm already curious why it gains a momentum that SILE apparently never had. Technical reasons, or did it just manage to get into the hype cycle?
I think both.
In the end they have to have both to sustain this for longer than a 1 day miracle.
Entering the hype cycle is not even a possibility unless the tech stack is positioned to be "right for the moment". But they need to convert the hype into results now, which is never guaranteed...
Also, I see SILE has 1.5k stars on Github. So they clearly had *some* of that momentum.
Maybe they seemed mildly less approachable at launch, since they didn't come with the usual startupy "integrated web experience" which helps onboard people from a wider range of backgrounds.
Or didn't even have a comparable launch? I missed them at the time. Typst had visibility from the Rust ecosystem before launch, which I think helped some.
@dginev Yes, maybe it's that big open sourcing moment versus a gradually growing project.
Ian Tindale@dginev which typesetters can this be used on?
If I understood correctly, currently Typst is a standalone tool for creating PDF files.
They have plans to emit HTML as well soon, which keeps some of us excited.
@dginev oh so it doesn’t directly connect to a typesetter or a phototypesetter
Not to my knowledge, no. They're trying to work at the TeX/LaTeX level of abstraction for the most part (I think).
Stefan ZitzYou could join their Discord and ask, or ask them in a Github issue 👋 I am not affiliated with Typst, so can't offer you real answers.
They just launched, and writing a thousand journal templates isn't fun. Maybe they'll choose to focus on their core platform, and have the community contribute the templates?
Martti Bergström@dginev After few hours of playing with it, I'm not yet fully convinced about everything Typst claims to be. Great, if it's of use to people who find TeX (or LaTeX, LuaTeX etc.) difficult to learn but I honestly can't see much difference in the learning curve, especially if you compare to using LaTeX through something like Overleaf for example.
Still very long way to go to get to the top of the stack, but nonetheless great addition in between MS Word and LaTeX. Might introduce it to my students
Certainly, it may need a couple of years of development and community growth before it starts feeling compelling for a switchover.
My excitement about it currently is from a developer standpoint. Time will tell if Typst lives up to its promise.
Jan D@dginev nice! I currently have a book in pandoc markdown, maybe I try to convert a part of it to see how it works for me (or wait for a pandoc reader?)
Jan Wedel@dginev @monkeydom my guilty pleasure was to write my master’s thesis and a scientific paper in Word after looking at Latex for a day or so. Fun fact: no one even noticed that because I matched all styles to a Latex template. 😊