I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions.

There are probably good reasons for all of that, but it is just both bad DX and bad UX. It feels like you need to be a hardcore LaTeX expert or consult with one, in order to accomplish the most mundane things. Especially in a reliable way, that won’t break upon making seemingly unrelated changes, or won’t break other things itself.

I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable. I guess that is the difference between an ad hoc macro system and an actually thought through programming language.

The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. That is, however, counteracted by being able to do things on your own, without immersing yourself deeply in LaTeX for years. Also, it will improve with time.

LaTeX is great, don’t get me wrong. But its heritage and historical baggage is really dragging it down.

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once.

Posts/discussion I found interesting:

- http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald...

- https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15733381

In particular it's interesting how people seem to think TeX itself is actually quite nice to use but its popularity and LaTeX packages created a huge mess of a system.

Not necessarily my experience. I wrote (and I am writing) several academic documents with it. There are its quirks, of course, but with good classes such as memoir, I don't feel the need to do a lot more than basic customization in the preamble. Still is a good tool for me.

I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis

+1 for Typst being amazing.

I can actually like write my own functions when I need to. I don't think I have ever written a LaTeX macro without having to look up a lot of stuff.

Not a latex post with someone talking about typst. Come back when the html output works. Not having good accessible output was more acceptable back when Tex was invented, it definitely isn’t now, and they made a new system and somehow got this worse then modern latex.

This mirrors my experience.

It's worth noting that TeX was developed in the same time period that the details of lexical scope were being nailed down by Guy Steele in the Rabbit compiler for Scheme. It's not that TeX is an ad hoc system; it's more the case that people didn't actually know how to implement a better system at the time.

I like LaTeX for the most part (I have had to use some weird hacks but usually once they are done they are stuck in a macro and turned ignorable).

But I think the main things it has going for it are that it: produces nice output, and all the journals accept it. Does there exist a tool that renders Typist to LaTeX? That could play nicely with the existing ecosystem.

as long as the arXiv doesn't accept Typst, it's never going to be a real alternative to LaTeX. and the arXiv maintainers seem either hostile or indifferent to Typst

Huh. My special lady friend is in the process of finishing up her thesis using LaTeX after ditching LibreOffice. It was nightmare for some of the same reasons: bad UX, bad portability and crippling bugs. There was a ramping up period, and she had an out of date GitHub repo to help her, but she is incredibly happy that she switched. Collaboration could be smoother I guess.

Latex is used because writing math in latex is very good, and despite how everything else (like tables and figures) is so bad.

That's why people take the math subset of latex and use it in other contexts - exactly like this product.

Yups, I love the idea of LaTeX, LaTeX itself not so much.

I hope Typst eventually gets some equivalent to tkz-euclide, as I've never seen anything even remotely comparable.

Is Typst appropriate for web apps; e.g., the input forms here?

> The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature.

This seems like the _perfect_ use for an LLM: systematically porting over as much of the "ecosystem" to Typst as possible. Is anyone doing that?

I know exactly what you mean, and that paired with a community that is absolutely sure that they know exactly how things need to be done and everyone that wants it in another way is dumb.

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You want Typst: https://github.com/typst/typst

It's like the JSX of Latex: markup in a programming language, not a programming language pretends to be markup.