> I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3

It's either already here or never happening, depending on your perspective [0] [1].

> it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic

What do you mean by "automation"?

[0]: https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/11/the-mythical-latex3

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-1/tb136mitt-history.pdf#page=5

Seems like an admirable project but they’re building on creaky foundations. Even the way TexLive is released feels like something from academia than a real piece of software.

> ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads.

> It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.

I don't know what constitutes "sane", but I literally just downloaded and installed it right now because you mentioned it, and it choked on a trivial hello world:

  $ mtxrunjit --script context doc.tex
  ...
  > tex error on line 1 in file doc.tex: ! Undefined control sequence
  ...
  1 >>  \documentclass{article}
  2     \begin{document}Hello, world\end{document}

I feel like this is gonna be a tougher sell than you expect. How the heck is a user expected to switch to ConTeXt?

I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book.

The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.

BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.

I recently had good luck writing a paper in org-mode. The .tex export has been around forever but I never really played with it - unlike other Emacs users, I don't actually use org-mode that much.

But in the end, it worked surprisingly well. Mind you, I didn't have anything too fancy in the paper (no figures, minipages, tikz, etc...), so that made the task very easy. But it was a good workflow:

  - Write org-mode text in left buffer.
  - Have Emacs issue a .tex export on save.
  - Have the document automatically compile when .tex files are newer than the .pdf file
  - Have the right buffer show and automatically reload the pdf file.

After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is open enough to try WYSWYG.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152982

Switched about 3 Years ago, never looked back. Its a happy place.

Typst lacks PGF/TikZ alternative.

Stared typst ages ago. Thanks for the reminder to try it out. Now the cost of switching is so low too

I've also started using typst for some projects. I am slowly getting used to the syntax. But it's a process for me. I also still have latex projects/docs

So happy to see new texlive as well

I've recently made a dozen vastly different projects with Typst, ALL of which would have created dependency hell, syntax noise, and hours of extra pointless work in Latex. It's such a clear win at this point it's embarrassing.

After delivering my thesis in LaTeX, I never bothered with it again, even at CERN back in 2003 most folks were using a mixture of Word and FrameMaker, with templates to have a TeX like paper output.

The last time I did this I used the isolandoftex docker image and set it up with DevContainers in vscode https://eccentric.dk/2025/08/25/using-texlive-with-dev-conta...

What's the most exciting thing going on in TeX right now?

SwiftLatex, TexLyre and StellarLatex seem to be exactly this. Apparently this is something a lot of people want to see in the world, awesome stuff. I wonder what's the performance like between native XeLaTex and these wasm version and if it will be Overleaf's demise if these solutions can be easily self-hosted by organizations without worrying about the server getting bogged down by compile jobs.

https://www.swiftlatex.com/

https://arxtect.github.io/StellarLatexLanding

https://texlyre.github.io/

You can still install old versions going back to the 90s [0]. If you specifically want to update/install a package on a current installation of TeX Live 2025, you just need to run

  tlmgr repository set https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2025/tlnet-final

[0]: https://tug.org/historic/