The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

> My biggest gripe with latex is the tooling. During my last paper, I ended up using a makefile which would usually work. When it didn’t work, running it twice would fix the issue. In the rarest cases, I had to run `git clean -xdf` and the next run would work.

I always feel like I’m doing something wrong when I have to deal with LaTeX and lose hours to fighting with the tooling. Even with a clean install on a new machine it feels like something fails to work.

The last time I had to change a document I had to go through what felt like 100 different search results of people with the same issue before I found one where there was a resolution and it was completely obscure. I tried to help out by reposting the answer to a couple other locations, but I was so exhausted that I swore off LaTeX for any future work unless absolutely unavoidable.

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy to gitignore.

https://mgeier.github.io/latexmk.html#running-latexmk

I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago:

    if [ -z "$(find . -name "*.bib" -print0)" ]; then
        # Just two runs, to cover TOC building, etc.
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    else
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        bibtex "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    fi

This is to say... I'm glad those days are gone.

Just use Tectonic nowadays for compiling LaTeX source. It automatically handles these cases of compiling multiple times.

Why didn't you use latexmk? It deals with the recompiling for you.

One of the things that really interests me about Typst is that the compile process seems much more deterministic and modern

I sincerely doubt they will: most journals in pure math still do not accept LuaTeX; just think about that.

There are already at least two publishers which accept Typst. So that "ever" part is already covered. But most still don't accept Typst and LaTeX is usually mandatory if the sources are required.

That is for sure my biggest concern with typst. I wrote a tool that can convert from typst to latex for final submissions, but it is a bit sketchy and at the moment won't handle math very well. https://gitlab.com/theZoq2/ttt

I'm not familiar with how journal submissions work, but don't you simply submit a pdf at the end? Does it matter what engine you used to render it?

I hate a lot of things about LaTeX (also wrote several theses in it, as well as research articles), but the math syntax definitely wasn't one of them. Why on earth would they change it?

Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code.

I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff.

Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.

Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.

One relatively optimistic prediction would be that a few will accept Typst, but latex export from Typst will gradually get more mature, until we end up with a charade where more people use other frontends like Quarto or Typst that output to latex rather than latex themselves for submission into journals - in certain fields. Somewhere after that time, Typst will break through and be generally accepted itself.

mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point.

[1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/

Regarding point 1: I'm so glad they didn't keep the math syntax, there's finally progress in math text input! E.g. we can now write

  $
    ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1, ... } \
    QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ }
  $

  $
    a = cases(
      0 & quad x <= 0,
      mat(1, 2; 3, 4) vec(x, y) & quad x > 0
    )
  $

  \begin{align*}
    \mathbb{Z} &= \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\
    \mathbb{Q} &= \left\{ \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\}
  \end{align*}

  \[
    a = \begin{cases}
      0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\
      \begin{pmatrix}1 & 2\\ 3 & 4\end{pmatrix}
      \begin{pmatrix}5\\6\end{pmatrix} & \quad x > 0
    \end{cases}
  \]

Typst really does feel refreshing in that sense… way less fiddly and a lot more predictable, especially for layout tweaks

The threat is literally the opposite, it is very freeing to be able to write typst syntax because it's quicker and easier to write. But then you're cursed by the fact that every other place now uses latex math syntax by convention.

To be fair $x^2=1$ literally works in typst.

It is very fast to learn the Typst math syntax. It is easy and intuitive and usually less verbose than LaTeX. It should not be a difficult thing to learn for most people.

Maybe if it's completely distinct. Else definitely no, unless, maybe, if the model is fine-tuned. Had a discussion about it with my dad whos work is developing in a non-mainstream SmallTalk dialect where it doesn't work at all.

I suppose it also depends on the specific LLM; the output of a free/low-cost model will likely be very different from a $200/month o1-pro.

I have so far not been able to get a major LLM to generate fully functional Typst code, no matter how much context I try to put into it. The models do not seem to currently understand Typst's concept of modes (code, markup and math) and especially in code mode suffers from heavy hallucination of syntax and/or semantics.

Typst is fully open source licensed under Apache-2.0 license. It is not a mix of any kind. Don't confuse the web app with Typst engine. The web app is a similar service to Overleaf and that is closed source. It is not mandatory, you can use Typst fully on your local machine. The team tries to make money and cover development costs with the web app. But the actual typesetting engine is fully open source and free.

you are wrong. typst's lead dev has stated that an important goal is to have the CLI (which is open source) and web app behave identically, even refusing to implement such a basic feature as PDF embedding because, due to technical reasons, it is currently incompatible with this goal. [1]

typst, the project, is not by any means a "mix" of open and closed, even if typst, the company, is. indeed, the most thorough LSP implementation available (tinymist) is not only open source but a community project. for another funny example see typstify, a paid typst editor not affiliated with the company. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145#issuecomment-17531...

[2]: https://typstify.com/purchase/

I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source.

Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally.

I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0 version so it's mostly maintenance) is that packages are automatically downloaded from the typst site, but an open repo can trivially be made considering that the set of packages used is just from a open source git repo and the closed source site just hosts tar.gz files of the folders in the repo. Not a big deal I think.

That is a real concern, but I wouldn't say there are any critical features in the closed source portion. I wrote the whole thesis locally with only open source tools. One of the included papers was written in the cloud platform for collaboration.

It is a concern that there is a single company doing most of the development, but there is quite a bit of community involvement so I don't think it is an immediate concern

>In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained.

The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No. Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on handsomely.

Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down the line it is possible that maintained forks will be controlled by big publishers paying maintainers to deal with the insanity of its internals. And we all know how lovely those publishers are (凸ಠ益ಠ)凸

> implementing critical features in the closed source portion

Like which critical features, for example?

> neglecting the open source part

So it's no different than fully open sourced projects.

On the flip side, new tools like Typst are trying to push the UX forward in ways that the LaTeX ecosystem often struggles with. I think it comes down to what risks you're comfortable with

Does that matter? The article is in PDF, as other latex generated PDFs.

Especially in combination with file watching. Your script writes to the JSON file and the entire document and everything that depends on it updates automatically, often in less than a second.

That sounds like a fun project! Alexandria is the way to go for now but hopefully they will get proper support for it sooner rather than later.

Until 0.13 it wasn't quite as good as latex in my experience, it mainly inserted more hyphens than LaTeX.

As of this version, it would be very hard to tell a difference in my experience

Yes, it uses a very similar algorith as LaTeX. It also incorporates already some microtype features out of the box. So the typesetting quality is very good and easily comparable to LaTeX. Working with Typst is so much easier and faster than with LaTeX so you will be more productive. Many things can be done without resorting to external packages and scripting is a breeze compared to LaTeX.

Just try it out. It is free, open source and very easy to setup. Just install the extension Tinymist on VSCode, that is all you need.

The Typst compiler is completely open-source. I prefer my local copy of the Typst compiler and CLI to whatever LaTeX provides right now already, and there seems to be a still growing community that could keep the project going even after a malicious acquisition of some kind.

I understand why people like using LLMs for coding, saves them having to think, but it is deeply frustrating to see it being such a crutch that some people cannot use new tools without it.

I suppose the issue is not new, many people didn't want to use new lanuages before because they couldn't copy snippets from the internet, but it was frustrating then too.

> and one area the current crop is bad at is doing layout in anything but latex. Not that they are good at latex, but they are terrible, terrible, terrible at typst

I'm surprised to hear that—I've been using GitHub Copilot with ConTeXt [0] since 2021, and it mostly works fairly well. And ConTeXt is much more obscure than Typst (but also much older, so maybe that gives it an advantage?).

[0] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Introduction/Quick_Start

Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?

It is hard to write macros in LaTeX.

In addition to making it possible to write easily, TeXmacs is also based on a markup language. It demonstrates that a markup language and WYSIWYG writing can coexist efficiently.

This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint, note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc..

Obvious reasons:

- Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you want it to look good.

- You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine.

- Spending time on tooling feels productive even if it is not past a certain point.

- People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend time on it.

That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different journal templates, so the less custom code the better.

I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.)

And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)

Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results (however minor). Actual research doesn’t. It’s the classic feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly productive activities like typesetting.

I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git.

Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually.

As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad), and then back into a brand new Word document.

This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for the nerves.

Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into LaTeX's trap. :)

I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors.

But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.

From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily.

Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.

For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly.

Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better.

And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.

Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros.

I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.

I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes.

In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever.

Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or working with an acceptable editor also helps.

>> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX.

Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful.

Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.

Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no chance of noticing unless a full review.

And publishing is the primary way academics communicate en large - it's kinda important to be able write your specific notation without resorting to drawing on paper.

First, you have to (or at least - you had to). I mean, it was the only way to sanely include a lot of formulae and managing bibliography.

Then you discover that is id beautiful. Honestly, even using base style sets you above the typesetting of books. With some extra tweaks, it is beautiful.

Did I spend a lot of time on LaTeX during my PhD. Sure! But (even counting in all masochism involved into dealing with LaTeX) I both cherish this time, and the results.

Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting?

I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.

People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.

Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other interested parties and they're all given the book.

Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc. So you really, really want it to look right at the first go.

There's been some progress the past few years now where you get to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.

I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they illuminated their manuscripts.

When I was in college I found out that I have better reading experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer to read Springer published reference books rather than class recommended books.

The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.

Well during 5 years of undergrad reports and papers, then 5 years of PhD thesis papers, you do tend to hoard some useful snippets, it is more of a byproduct than a fixation... at least for me.

It's like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste.

Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.

I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.

I have often thought that LaTEX' distinctive font and formatting is either a virtue signal or an in-group signal.

Interesting! Did you use a tool to do the conversion automatically? How did it pick up on custom packages and styling?

These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX:

1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.

2. Compiling is instant.

3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).

4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.

5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.

6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.

It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell.

I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current needs (or where needs just didn't change) is fine, but it's not the case of LaTeX.

I appreciate your postscript. I don't use TeX or vim out of nostalgia; I didn't discover TeX until I was a senior in undergrad, and I think I didn't discover vim until after I finished my Ph.D. I use vim because it seems best for its tasks, given the way I think (though maybe I think that way because I'm old). I use TeX because I write math for a living and have invested a huge amount of time using it, so that it's become intuitive to me even though I know it wouldn't be for a newcomer, and I can't be bothered to break long-established habits until I know an alternative will be established everywhere TeX is.

Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality typesetting with an emphasis on maths.

I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.

Jesus

Since when is TypeScript a typesetting engine?

Why would you want to implement an entire typesetting engine yourself?

> AI is the primary audience for our writing, and the primary reason to reconsider our choice of markup format.

That's AI which must adapt, not humans. If AI can't adapt then it can't be considered intelligent.

> Some thawed-out-of-a-glacier journal editors still insist on two column formats, as if anyone still prints to paper.

Narrow text is easier to read because you don't have to travel kilometres with your eyes. I purposely shrink width of the browser when reading longer texts.

- AI is the primary audience for our writing

I've been wondering about this a lot lately, specifically if there's a way to optimise my writing for AI to return specific elements when it's scraped/summarised (or whatever).

Printing is still not uncommon in professional scientific environments. When you actually have to read a paper, it turns out that actual paper is quite convenient.

The idea of publishing as an animation + Typst doc actually sounds pretty compelling… the old PDF format is starting to feel pretty stale

Personally, I write for humans.