Is there somewhere a sensible analysis of various packages/systems for writing papers/articles/etc.
Forty years ago I wrote my PhD in the original #TeX and have never really got into #LaTeX ... now I hear that there are things like #Typst and perhaps others.
What options are there, and how do they compare?
#AskingForAdvice ...
@ColinTheMathmo I used LaTeX extensively. Typst is years ahead when it comes to usability and just pure joy of use. There are still a few things missing but I would not look back.
Check out https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2026.2269 for a quick comparison.
Another one that we use (for sharing / collaboration) is Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com
@ColinTheMathmo IMHO practically speaking if you are going to be working with others or submitting to most existing publications and so on you will have to have a way to work in LaTeX because even though it's old and creeky it's pretty much the standard "wire format" for these things. And, it's almost always the case that _someone_ has figured out how to do most of the things you would want to do.
But if you are just writing for yourself this is not a consideration, and trying out the new tool would be practical. It's certainly a lot cleaner.
Personally I'd probably use markdown + TeX style math for most things where practical. But this has limitations.
@psu_13 @ColinTheMathmo TeX has been the unrivalled standard in the mathematical sciences for over 40 years because it is the most robust programming environment that I have ever used.
Yes, it contains throw-backs to 8-bit 1980s programming and it makes arithmetic and ordinary programming gratuituously awkward, but Knuth's insistence that it can only be changed to fix bugs is the reason for its robustness.
I didn't say LaTeX. In the early 1990s a bunch of Germans added some great code for selecting fonts to LaTeX. I wish they had left it there. But 30 years later they're still messing around with it and it's still called LaTeX2e, e being epsilon for "a small change".
For example, my commutative diagrams package was written c1990 with the policy that it works with plain TeX but *cooperates* with LaTeX if it's there (which of course it usually is). It relies on TeX's paragraph builder because that is the only way of splitting maths formulae. In no other programming environment would such a hack have continued to work for very long. But a few years ago the LaTeX-meddlers broke the paragraph builder and hence my diagrams. However, I managed to un-break what they did.
One day TeX will be replaced. May that day be postponed as long as possible! The "replacement" will be some bloated garbage from MicroSoft or Adobe that is full of security holes and stops working after a couple of years, to make you "upgrade" it to something more bloated and even more insecure.
@jpthiele That's true and understandable. I'm wondering about articles to be made available on websites, for example.
I'm also interested in packages that can produce #LaTeX as an export option, or which provide direct assisted (not #AI!) editing of \( \LaTeX\) files.
So all opinions and thoughts are welcome as "grist to the mill".
@ColinTheMathmo just to note for the "articles available on websites", if you mean to generate the html then that's also possible with LaTeX. My entire website is written in LaTeX: https://loopspace.mathforge.org
More generally, I find that LaTeX alternatives are usually trying to solve a problem that I don't have, so I've never tried them. I have yet to encounter something that has caused me enough grief in LaTeX to warrant the time and effort that I would need to learn something else, and there are several features of it that I find fit nicely with my way of writing that often seem to be what these alternatives are targeting.
And with the advent of LuaLaTeX and LaTeX3, a lot of the issues have been or are being solved. Eg LuaLaTeX makes fonts and unicode a breeze, while the LaTeX3 team is foing amazing work on accessibility.
@loopspace As I say, I used #TeX for my PhD. I found it clear, understandable, and comparatively easy to use. All the things I needed to do I could work out how to do.
I find #LaTeX to be rather impenetrable in terms of asking it to do anything that someone else hasn't thought of and programmed in a package that somehow I have to find, install, and use without understanding.
So often I've started using it, wanted to do a thing, and been unable to work out how, so I've given up. Sometimes I've given up using #LateX, sometimes I've given up trying to do the thing.
1/n
@loopspace What I need is to share an office with someone who knows how to do stuff with LaTeX so every time I get stuck they can say:
Oh that's easy, just do this ... and then it works.
I'm sure LaTeX is powerful, I'm sure it can so everything I need, I just can't work out how to acquire that knowledge.
I've tried ... many times.
Also ... I'm venting. I'm frustrated, and can see no way to gain the skills and knowledge that will let me accomplish my tasks, and yet currently lie out of reach.
2/n, n=2.
@ColinTheMathmo I get that, and it's why I tried to couch my reply in terms of my experience rather than try to preach at you.
Maybe I was just lucky in terms of having people around who could answer those questions when I was starting out.
But a lot of what I find people complain about does mystify me. I've spent ages trying to figure out the right python package to install to do some obscure routine, but I don't hear the same complaints about python. The macro language _just works_ for me as an author. It's only clunky when I'm programming in it. So everyone who tries to take that away from me will find me hanging on to it with bared teeth!
So maybe I can offer to "sit next" to you when you're trying to do something and make suggestions. Would that be helpful?
@loopspace I may very well take you up on that ... I've made a note of your comments and your offer, and the next time this comes up "for real" I may very well get in touch.
Thank you ... I will try not to be too prickly!
@ColinTheMathmo @loopspace My impression is that #LaTeX is excellent for people who don't have strong requirements/preferences that other people haven't already catered for, but will be content to use the standard document formatting tools that it provides. (I was happy with what it did for me.)
#TeX is better for the complement of that set of people...
@RobJLow @ColinTheMathmo @loopspace it's also worth noting that a lot of people don't understand or care about the difference between TeX (the typesetting engine), plain TeX (the minimalist macro package written by Donald Knuth) and LaTeX (the maximalist macro package written by Leslie Lamport), and so will interpret complaints about TeX as complaints about LaTeX and vice-versa.
(My take is that LaTeX is an absolute monstrosity, but it's not entirely Lamport's fault: Knuth's choice to base TeX's input language on textual macro expansion meant that any nontrivial code written in it would be complex and brittle.)
@fanf I have, and it looks perfect for what I want.
Problem is that I've tried four times to install it and got stuck each time. Looking up the problems in the 'net resulted in instructions which in some cases were just wrong, and in other cases were spectacularly inconsistent and contradictory.
So I guess it's fine to try again, and perhaps to be more persistent.
@benleis @ColinTheMathmo In the @PseudoRandomEnsemble banger, The Mathematical Villain gleefully sings:
Who bollocksed up your brackets so your LaTeX won’t compile
And sweetly sends back emails saying “Couldn’t read the file”?
(Could you send it in Word, please?)
@ColinTheMathmo
I have been a strong TeX (and actually LaTeX) advocate for many years but have seen things change slowly in the last, say, 5 years.
I firs switched to markDown for basic texts that either didn't need serious formatting, or texts that I could convert to multiple formats via pandoc. Private notes in the Joplin app, reworked versions of blog posts, meeting minutes...
A few months ago, I discovered typst and I'm starting to use it more and more. The boundary is stuff I could wish to have published, but even then, its relatively light marked-up language makes me confident about the easiness of translating it into something else. Lecture notes (with little math), some letters, and even slides for a general audience conference the other night.
@ColinTheMathmo wrote my thesis with it, it is now open source if you want to have an idea: https://github.com/drupol/master-thesis
Typst is amazing, I use it almost everyday now. I can safely say that he replaced latex completely.
I highly recommend it!
how timely! here's a deep dive from a smart guy about writing a technical book using another plain text system: quarto.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2026/03/09/using-quarto-to-write-a-book/
I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a complete draft of the book at its website. The production process hasn’t started yet, so it’s not ready to pre-order or anything, but the site has a one-question form you can fill out that asks for your email address if you’d like to be notified with one (and only one) email when it’s available. A lot has changed since the first edition, reflecting changes both in R and ggplot specifically, and in the world of coding generally. I may end up highlighting some of those new elements in other posts. But here, I want to focus on some nerdy details involved in getting the book to its final draft. I’ll discuss Quarto, the publishing system I used, its many advantages, and its current limits with respect to the demands I made of it.
reading a bit more, my (half-baked) mental model is that quarto is a composition/tooling system for any number of lower-level authoring formats (latex/markdown/etc). typst is another one of those formats, meant to be as powerful as latex but easier to learn/use.
here's a short post focusing on one part of the picture. https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/pdf-quarto/making-pdf-with-quarto-typst-latex/
Colin the Mathmo
Szymon Bęczkowski
Georg Tuparev
j_bertolotti
psu_13
Paul Taylor
Philipp Thiele
Andrew Stacey (he/him)
RobJLow
Pozorvlak
Mair A-W
Tony Finch
Colin Beveridge
Benjamin Leis ✅
⏚ Antoine Chambert-Loir
bruce oberg
Pol Dellaiera
