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.

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gucci-on-fleek 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I work on the packaging in TeX Live, and I'll freely admit that it's arcane and convoluted (from a packager's perspective), but it's super reliable, and the end-users are mostly insulated from all the inner workings. It can indeed be tricky to debug if something breaks, but this is thankfully quite rare.

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noosphr 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, unlike real software it has backward compatibility to the 80s.

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mr_mitm 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Things break all the damn time with LaTeX. Example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/730126/update-to-cle...

Sometimes bugs appear only if you load three specific packages in a specific order. The fact that there are no namespaces and every package can modify everything makes it a complete nightmare. LaTeX would do well to take a hint from the lessons we learned in the past 40 years. Or just retire it and push something sane forward, like Typst.

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noosphr 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Latex is not Tex.

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mr_mitm 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Neither is texlive. Texlive and LaTeX is what this thread and the comment you replied to are about.

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noosphr 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Typst is a replacement for TeX.

Not LaTeX.

You'd of course need to read the documentation on what TeX and LaTeX are to understand this. Most people would rather write a new system.

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mr_mitm 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.

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noosphr 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Have you written documents in raw TeX?

	▲	leephillips 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve written book-length documents in Plain TeX (probably what you mean — nobody writes in “raw” tex) and in LaTeX. I would say that Typst, if it’s a replacement for anything, is a replacement for LuaLaTeX, because of its programmability. But in this article I framed it as a possible LaTeX replacement: https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/