Comment by adamnemecek
14 hours ago
Typst is the most important open source project of the last 5 years.
I predict a future where markdown and latex are largely replaced by typst. And I couldn't be more excited.
It is such a stepup from markdown and latex. Try it today if you are intrigued.
Not so sure.
I work with a lot of people in academia who work with LaTeX. I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists. And the source material is usually just thrown in Word or LibreOffice.
The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not? There's not much reason to. And you will hit the same brick walls doing so that you hit with TeX the first time round.
If it is a greenfield, possibly, but all the orgs I've seen using LaTeX have been using TeX since the dawn of time and respect the accumulated knowledge rather than the distraction of a new tool.
I'm in academia and used to use LaTeX for everything, and have switched almost 100% to typst. Not many of my colleagues are aware of typst but a few use it.
I think there is hope though. Grad students are slowly picking it up, and they are the future of academia. I've seen similar transitions away from Fortran and Matlab as grad students embrace different tools than what their advisors use.
Until the arxiv supports it, what's the point?
> accumulated knowledge
my experience is the opposite. Due to LaTeX's arcane scripting and the lack of interest people have in learning it beyond "it compiles on overleaf", I'm seeing a lot of accumulated superstition. People copying and pasting preambles with useless packages, unused newcommands. Worse, people sometimes use their group's newcommands without being aware of the native functions, e.g. \beginmymatrix replacing \begin{pmatrix}. Even if change is slow, any amount of Typst adoption is good.
If it's any consolation we use native stuff including pmatrix :). In fact most of our typesetting is very very plain LaTeX.
I’m in academia and I try to convert everyone I know… I only recently started using it for a few things, and I used Claude to do some pretty advanced stuff that I wouldn’t have ventured to even try with latex. That is, I think a lot of the relevant CTAN packages can be developed using LLMs more quickly than you might expect.
For next year, I plan to prepare a thesis template for our university and encourage students to try it instead of latex (most of our students use latex now).
Academia is stuck in the past in a lot of ways.
Just use it and advertise it; they'll catch on eventually.
I prefer to think of it as mature.
> I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists.
It was released in 2023 and became polished enough to use like last year. Yeah, adoption takes time but the technology is significantly better.
> The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not?
With latex you have to rely on third party. With typst you can write it yourself (or with an agent), like writing functions is not painful in typst.
Well not really because we have a few CTAN contributors.
How is it an step-up from markdown? Markdown (w/o any embedded html) is a simple text formatting that lets you read it as a plain text file with some minor formatting when rendered. Typst source files are not human readable in the same way and would be terrible at it. Typst is great when you need typesetting, but if you just want plain text, readable files it isn't it. E.g. markdown for notes, typst for papers.
Anything is a step-up for Markdown, unless you include HTML in your Markdown. The base features of AsciiDoc (or Org-mode) are alike to Markdown in terms of simplicity (no typesetting).
I'm not sure either matter to be honest.
It's cool sure, powerful also... but when anybody has access to both vector-based editor and raster-based editor ... but also tools that incorporate them, e.g. rich text editors ... but also entire toolchain going from compilers to libraries all the way to Web based notebook with their editors and running environment that can then output printable artifacts, I don't think there has to be "the" way. They might be a more popular way within a certain zeitgeist but... does one project has to "replace" another one?
I guess I don't really get the passion some people have for "perfect" rendering. I'm fine with just text, then just readible equations below it, then an OK looking graph. I don't actually care if any of those are pixel perfect. I don't get it.
IMHO in terms of actual knowledge transmission reproducibility and interactivity are way more important. They might not look as good and in fact introduce a TON of complexity but I believe it's better than yet another system that is slightly better looking while being slightly easier, for those people with a specific mindset, to setup and use.
PS: still both Gribouille and Typst are cool projects! Just want to make sure I'm not sounding critical against those efforts.
I cannot tell the future of typst and gribouille, but for:
> I'm fine with just text, then just readible equations below it, then an OK looking graph. I don't actually care if any of those are pixel perfect. I don't get it.
what you describe is fine for a readme or a blog post, but for books, scientific articles, or any long format, having a good layout and typography will totally impact the end result
I agree but to me it seems humanity has a terminal case of being unable to separate content from presentation. I can see it in this thread with clamoring for Typst in READMEs etc. If READMEs need to be anything they need to be plain bloody text. Markdown is the absolute maximum. Having some “header semantics” defined is fine as that’s universal in a document but let’s keep it simple guys, OK?
Information needs to be plain and clear. Presentation can be fancy. Let’s keep these very, very different things separate. AI will thank you as well.
I agree with that, that's why I am starting with plain syntax first in https://zero.practal.com, because that is really where all the information/logic lives. But there will also be a presentation layer on top of that, building on the information layer, so with time, I would expect it also to subsume much latex/typst functionality. The "header semantics" I already copied from Markdown.
If you've ever debugged TeX package conflicts because someone wants "that layout, except with those headers and this font", yes the whole stack needs replacing with something that does not hold all its state in global variables and has a sensible scripting language (LuaTeX never really took off).
My primary use for Typst is pretty agendas for my Toastmasters club. https://typst.app/project/rmyyeU17y51rl6ISSqGji9
Typesetting isn't just for science. I like that it looks good; I enjoy the creative step of experimenting with document design; and Typst is just fun to use.
> It's cool sure, powerful also... but when anybody has access to both vector-based editor and raster-based editor ... but also tools that incorporate them, e.g. rich text editors ... but also entire toolchain going from compilers to libraries all the way to Web based notebook with their editors and running environment that can then output printable artifacts, I don't think there has to be "the" way. They might be a more popular way within a certain zeitgeist but... does one project has to "replace" another one?
cool, why do you think people use tikz? And like generating images programmatically from text is impossibly more powerful than using vector editors.
For Latex I agree thats definitely. Markdown I am unsure as Markdown is not meant for creating documents but to just have a little Richt Text Markup in READMEs and other Text files. Typst needs a compile step and altough that one is fast as hell it is still different from Markdown that renders directly from the file without an intermediary.
Right; but markdown has expanded beyond that niche. Lots of projects use markdown for other stuff - like mdbook, or for blogs.
I think markdown is a great format for readme files. But for real documentation, the added features of typst are fantastic. Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly!
I want typst for blogging, long form articles and documentation. Markdown is great for small stuff. But it doesn't scale.
Fascinating Ideas I love hearing opinions on this, it enriches me.
I do belive that atleast simple files like for example READMEs will stay and perhaps are better to stay as Markdown. One advantage that has is that while scripting is cool, It make the document not plain text readable which is a tradeoff one can argue.
Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Academic papers and books, novels, thousands of ebooks, have been written in single file markdowns for 15 years.
Writing directly in typst is good for small things with intense typesetting like ... wedding invitations, advertisements. But it doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers.
Writing is not typesetting.
All the forms need for the composition of all civilized text were present in word perfect 5.1, which unlike Word, Latex and Typst, permitted no typsetting during the process of writing. They were all recovered in the writers' markdowns nearly two decades ago.
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What's the state for generating websites from Typst?
The problem with markdown is that it's not extensible and that there is no spec. Essentially all READMEs would be better off using typst, they would make for better READMEs.
I do not think that is the problem with markdown lol. There are lots of problems with markdown, especially vanilla or the more limited versions of it - but really its super power is that it is readable with a regular text editor (or `cat`) and can be rendered without a compilation step.
Markdown is not competing with latex or typst, it is competing with (and has won against) .txt files
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As I said in a previous comment typst especialy with extending via scripting stops being plain text readable. A Markdown file (whatever flavor it may be) is still fundamentaly one vi,nano, Editor, Notepad++ away from being read with all its context included. It is a tradeoff that for READMES I would not want to make.
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There have been theoretically precise published specs for serious markdowns for 15 years. The commonmark convention is a common specification for many including e.g the familiar simple github variant, which emphatically does have a completely perfect specification.
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Of course it's extensible, you can put HTML in it, and HTML is extensible.
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I like typst. But I am not a fan of the syntax. I use it as an intermediate format on the way to PDF. A document markup language should avoid building a programming language inside it. Pick python, or lua, or whatever.
Markdown and Typst serve different markets - I don't need page layouts and font choices in a pull request, for example. Typst is however a good Markdown++ in that once a collection of markdown files grows to book size, it's easy enough to port.
Typst challenging TeX would be my dream too - there's a lot of math you can port just be leaving off the backslashes. Mind you the kids these days know TeX primarily as "that language in overleaf".
Markdown is already seen as arcane by non technical folks. Which is sad btw.
Typst is not going to replace it.
That said I was not a huge latex user and nowadays I use typst a lot. Typst is everything I was expected from latex.
The content is in markdown and loaded by typst with cmarker