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Comment by revolvingthrow

1 day ago

I used (and will continue to use) most of those. Quick rules of thumb:

- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html

- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside

- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)

- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever

By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?

9 comments

revolvingthrow

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nextaccountic  2 hours ago

I don't care about missing features, but I just want a way to export to latex using typst.

It's okay if this is not the day to day tool used to render, but this should be possible. It's just a compiler between two languages, and latex happens to be Turing complete (and can display arbitrary things to a PDF), so it's 100% in the "not impossible" category

With such a tool nobody has to know if you use typst personally. Just like, say, nobody has to know you use jj rather than git

sbinnee  14 hours ago

> (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)

I chuckled. I'd love to try out typst when the time comes. But for writing a journal paper, it's still going to be latex.

  • dgacmu  17 minutes ago

    I've been testing it out by using it to create the quizzes for a course I'm teaching this semester. My conclusion is that it's well worth finding a way to try it out. Drastically reduces the amount of boilerplate.

    (I haven't yet tried to write a full paper in it.)

0x3444ac53  21 hours ago

I'm sorry, what exactly is the issue with typst?

  • kitchi  20 hours ago

    No issues per se, but academic publishing has deep roots in the latex ecosystem. So templates from publishers are often not available in typst, or the publisher insists on a latex formatted file.

    Often supervisors/professors etc will also resist using typst because of the cognitive overhead on their already oversubscribed time. Typst has about 40 years of history to overcome and that will take a long time to do.

  • CJefferson  11 hours ago

    They made a new format with basically no accessibility. We finally got latex usable by blind people with acceptable html output, I’m not moving to something worse.