I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly.
Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.
I’m gradually moving my work over to Typst and it’s been a breath of fresh air. Compiles very quickly.
Perhaps the hardest part has been relearning the syntax for math notation; Typst has some interesting opinions in this space.
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.
Claude and the like are a huge problem for new languages that want to do new things. It was bad enough when a LaTeX replacement had to compete with forty-ish years of package development time. Now they also have to compete with the millions of lines of existing code LLMs have hoovered up.
I've done some simple Typst programming via Claude, and it worked fine. I expected it to be ignorant of Typst but that was not the case.
One of the best things about Typst is that most tasks are very simple. Compared to the reams of Latex BS I was replacing, building my book with Typst is momumentally simpler.
Sure but if the LLMs are making LaTeX easy to work with then why bother trying migrate everyone to a new language?
I think there are a bunch of assumptions behind your statement that I believe are not true:
1. Latex is sufficient for all document publishing needs. E.g. converting Latex to HTML is bad to non-existent, while Typst has HTML export.
2. LLMs are sufficient for solving all problems one can encounter.
3. Things that are easier for humans are not also easier for LLMs.
4. New releases of LLMs will not learn more about Typst
At the end of the day I'm not trying to migrate anyone. Use whatever you feel is best. For my use cases I'm convinced Typst is a better option than Latex.
> why bother trying to migrate everyone to a new language?
.. because a new language might be better?
But moving forward it’ll be harder to tell if any given new language is better than existing alternatives. LLMs burden their users with an almost insurmountable status quo bias.
Because LaTeX is ugly to write and not human-friendly. Adding an AI agent to the loop does not fix those issues.
Great for code re-use but I agree, terrible for anything new.
Which is good, because we don't want to deal with inferior solutions to typesetting that pop up every few years.
A slight bias in favor of the status quo might be acceptable or even desired. However current LLMs strongly favor traditional languages and are unable to comprehend even modern language features not part of their base training set.
Consider the counterfactual of LLMs being available in the 1990s, trained mainly on the world's C code. Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently. It's not just about Typst or typesetting specifically but programming language design in general and that improvements are becoming much harder to push through.
> Perhaps we would still be exclusively writing C today for new languages' code could not been synthesized as easily or conveniently.
I'm not actually sure that would be a bad thing? All the reasons that immediately come to mind to move away from C have to do with ergonomics and safety, the latter largely being a product of the former IMO. If an LLM can ingest my entire codebase and do 90% of the work to get me to the changes I need doesn't that obviate the majority of the motivation to change languages in the first place?
If we get a completely autonomous AI it probably won't program in C (or any other human-understandable language).
If it still programs in a human readable language, that means people need to review the code, at least from times to times. And it's much easier to review modern languages than C.
Have you tried typst at least once. You have big words but it is lightyears better than Latex.
I don't know about Claude, but when it comes to LaTeX IDE, I will always recommend TeXStudio over everything else. It handles all the annoying problems of LaTeX setup and compilation, and it provides a discoverable interface with classic-style menus (words, it has words instead of inexplicable little icons!) for various common tasks.
I say that as someone who uses a tricked-out Vim for my own LaTeX workflow, and VS Code for several programming languages.
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/
I'll only say that learning typst is easier than learning LaTeX.
It also has first class support for unicode (as does LaTeX via some packages) which if combined with a suitable keyboard layout makes both writing and reading math source code infinitely more pleasant :)
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?
I think anything that is chock full of backslashes and braces can surely be improved upon.
You will end up with just a different escape character.