Modern LaTeX
223 comments
·May 5, 2025BlackFly
JackeJR
There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?
With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever.
Without a fixed medium, you have to have logic to address the different mediums and compromises have to be made.
SebastianKra
That seems contradictory, when Latex is rather famously imprecise at placing figures and such. Weren't both languages (at least at some point) intended to take layouting control away from the writer?
But regardless, I think that, in addition to moving away from Latex we should also reconsider the primary output format. Documents are rarely printed anymore, and inaccessible, fixed-size A4 pdfs are annoying to read on anything but an iPad Pro.
wtallis
LaTeX isn't intended to take layout control away from the author so much as it is intended to automatically produce a good-enough layout allowing a single author to produce a very large document without employing a designer.
HTML by contrast explicitly does remove control over layout from the author and place it in the hands of the user (and their chosen user agent).
Both languages have mechanisms to (somewhat) separate the content from the formatting rules.
dgfl
Well, maybe they’re not printed by yourself. But many academics, often young people included, still print papers.
chabska
HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.
SkiFire13
Note that this won't prevent the page from being displayed in other sizes, where it will most likely have a broken layout instead.
maegul
Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation?
Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.
karencarits
> For latex, you choose your target at the start
Yes, sometimes, but I would say that one of the benefits of latex is how easy you can switch to another layout. But I guess the point is that you typically render to a set of outputs with fixed dimensions (pdf)
josephg
Its the same reason that Markdown became popular. I want my document to primarily contain content. Not a sea of handwritten tags.
I don't want to manually type (or read past) HTML tags littered around the place. I don't want to manually put <p> tags on my text, or worry about how indentation will affect my rendered output. (For example, <p>foo</p> and <p> foo </p> render differently).
If I'm writing a blog post, I also don't want my post's text to get mixed up with site specific stuff, like meta tags and layout elements.
Are there any good "literate HTML" type tools which first and foremost let me type text, but still let me break into HTML? That I could get behind.
tannhaeuser
SGML (ISO 8879) has basically all these things: it infers tags (such as for opening paragraphs as in your example, but also infers missing html, head, and body tags, and also infers end-element tags for paragraphs, etc etc), has a built-in mechanism for recognizing custom tokens and turn those into tags to implement markdown and custom syntaxes, provides text macros, and many, many more things (including stylesheets, transformations for things such as table of content generation and search result views).
In other words, SGML is complementing the HTML vocabulary with authoring affordances, as originally intended (HTML is based on it).
wolfgang42
Markdown as specified lets you break out HTML whenever you want, and even understands the difference between inline and block tags. Most places where you can use markdown support this.
Personally I’m also a fan of https://github.com/pugjs/pug , which is an alternate syntax for HTML that I find easier to work with when I need the full power of HTML but don’t want a thicket of angle brackets.
josephg
> Markdown as specified lets you break out HTML whenever you want
I know, but breaking into raw html isn’t as useful as you’d hope. You need a lot of html just to make an image with a caption. And all that ugly html needs to be copy pasted each time it’s needed, since there’s no way to reuse it.
And there’s lots of problems you can’t really solve like that at all. For example, I want latex style automatic numbering of figures (Figure 8: Xxx) and I want to link to that figure elsewhere in the document (“for detail, see Figure 8”). I want the numbers to be automatically generated based on document order. I also want numbered sections / headings. You can sort of do with css. But you can’t automatically label the links to those sections. Markdown also doesn’t support comments. You can use html comments but then my internal notes / removed sections end up in the generated html!
Even trying to do some of this stuff makes your document become - as you said - a thicket of angle brackets. I want to retain the readability of my document along the way. Even with a tool like pug, do I have to type a P before each paragraph? Gross. I just want to write my paragraphs with line breaks, like markdown. I don’t want it peppered with stuff like that. And I don’t want forced indentation on my prose.
p This is not a natural
p way to write a series of paragraphs of texteinpoklum
> I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with... HTML...
At the very least, because those are the two popular software systems used for creating documents. HTML+CSS isn't; and Javascript is irrelevant for print.
KeplerBoy
Because HTML is not an option. For academic papers you usually have to submit pdfs conforming to either a latex or word template.
setopt
In many math and physics journals, as well as on arXiv, you usually submit the TeX file itself so they can adjust it and recompile.
flanked-evergl
Academic publishing standards are about as much of a joke as academia itself.
KeplerBoy
Sure, but if you ignore academia, you might as well ignore LaTeX.
SkiFire13
There was an article on this semirecently that compared among other things HTML and Latex for typesetting. https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines
maxnoe
HTML + CSS is only half of the equation. The renderer is also important. So you need a layout engine that turns the HTML+CSS into something you can view.
Most of the time, this is one of the browser engines, but there are many more things.
There is e.g. weasyprint to produce PDFs from HTML and CSS, which would be the closest alternative to LaTeX taking HTML+CSS as input.
For simple documents, it's a much cleaner alternative, I used it to autogenerate documents in a python backend.
kzrdude
Is there a microtype (latex package) for the web?
dev_l1x_be
For me Typst replaced Latex years ago.
pros:
- one small compiler that can output: pdf, png, svg, html
- compilation is fast (see below)
- syntax is much cleaner than Latex
- few ways of to a thing
- already has all the templates most people need
- tooling is good enough with VS Code
- supports SVG images
cons:
- less users?
time typst compile cv.typ
________________________________________________________
Executed in 126.21 millis fish external
usr time 93.66 millis 0.07 millis 93.58 millis
sys time 37.97 millis 1.51 millis 36.46 millisAl-Khwarizmi
A big con is that there are no typst templates for journals and conferences that academics submit papers to. For me, this is a show-stopper. I would love to be able to ditch latex because honestly it's old and it shows a lot, in spite of apologists saying that it's perfect. But 90+% of my usage starts from a conference or journal template, so at the moment it's not gonna happen.
tcfhgj
I don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years into typst (according to my experience).
The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers
rlkf
> The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers
Some scientific journals, which only provides a Word template, require you to print to PDF to submit, then ships this PDF to India, where a team recreates the look of the submission in LaTeX, which is then used to compose the actual journal. I wish this was hyperbole. For these journals, you can safely create a LaTeX-template looking _almost_ the same, and get away with it.
Eddy_Viscosity2
The problem is the user-base and acceptance of latex vs Typst. I use latex and as aware as I am about its deficiencies, I can create a doc faster in it than any other tool that I have not ever used before. I also have a bunch of utilities I created for my specific use-cases automating data into tables, figures, etc, ready for latex import.
So its a mass and momentum problem. Typst not only has to be better/easier/faster than latex, but to a degree that it justifies all of the labor and time to learn it and change all that existing template and utility infrastructure built up over decades. A high bar.
If Typst (or some other new contender) could also read and compile latex code and packages alongside its own syntax then that would be a game-changer. Then I can use all my old stuff and gradually change things over to typst (or whatever).
MortyWaves
But I thought one of the points of latex was to emit pdf files? Are you saying these places are so backwards they only accept latex and word files? What stops them being edited by someone?
jltsiren
The real problem is that LaTeX is often an interchange format. Whatever tools you use to write the paper, they must ultimately output LaTeX. In the publisher's template, using only the features and packages approved by the publisher, and consistent with any other requirements the publisher may have. The publisher then takes the LaTeX output and processes it further to generate the actual document in whatever format they prefer.
fastasucan
Have you checked out Quarto? There are a lot of templates supported already, and possible to create out of latex if not (or just generate latex from Quarto).
dev_l1x_be
These journals have no incentive to include it. This is a classical chicken and egg problem.
stared
Is there any side-by-side comparison of a page created by LaTeX by Typst?
My main selling points is that with LaTeX, it is easy to create typography shines beauty for a distance. (Often way better that most of books you find in stores.) With other typesetting systems, usually it is not the case. Yet, I am waiting for new things that offer simplicity, yet have same (or better!) visuals that LaTeX.
creata
As far as I know, the main differences (in the body text) between LaTeX and, say, Word, are the linebreaking algorithm (Knuth-Plass, which is used for both ragged-right and justified text) and the microtypography package. Is there anything else that contributes to the quality of LaTeX's output for ordinary English text?
Typst apparently uses Knuth-Plass, but I don't see any information about microtypography.
stared
From what I see, it is also section breaking, fonts, and general typesetting defaults, such as margins, section, etc (sure, they vary from package to package, and some are ugly, but the default are aesthetically pleasing).
xiaohanyu
Typst is a pretty good alternative to LaTeX and I agree all pros in your comment, with only one major deal breaker now: its CJK support is not mature enough and not producation-ready yet.
I wrote a post half year ago explained the details for my decision between LaTeX and Typst: https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines#typst
dochtman
Typst is the modern LaTeX.
cjs_ac
For all the well-deserved complaints about TeX's and LaTeX's syntax, Typst only makes this worse, by repurposing even more characters as markup.
SkiFire13
I don't think this was ever my issue with Latex, which instead are mostly:
- the cryptic error messages and infinite logs
- the unintuitive ways to do stuff like store a value for later use or sum two lengths
- the very long compile times
- the amount of reliance on global state from various packages, which contributes to even more cryptic errors or weird behavior when something goes wrong
- various other quirks, e.g. the fact you often need to end a line with a comment or the newline will skrew up your content.
__mharrison__
You forgot the of syntax that is latex. Very hard to read. (Worked with it for 20 years)
Typst on the other hand is inherently readable.
creata
I could deal with all of the other issues if it weren't for the absurdly long compile times. I wonder where most of that time is spent.
blueflow
I'll put my finger on the perceived weak point: Which characters? Are they listed somewhere?
cjs_ac
Sure: the Typst syntax is detailed here: https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/
The non-control characters of ASCII are largely characters you might actually want to put in a document. TeX uses some of these as markup, e.g., the dollar sign to bracket maths mode and the ampersand as a column separator in tables. Typst takes this much further, using plus and minus signs to introduce list items, at signs for references, and so on.
Ideally, all visible characters should produce themselves in the printed output, except for the backslash introducing control sequences that represent all of the markup and braces for delimiting the extent of parameters to those control sequences. This would produce a very predictable and easily-parsed syntax.
fsiefken
Typst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I prefer using it. But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement. The ecosystem is also larger. I have LaTex documents I struggle to convert.
koakuma-chan
[flagged]
fsiefken
I know, i love pedal to the metal - small is beautiful, it's lean and mean, but it's not a replacement in some cases.
As an alternative, tectonic is a bit faster then the standard LaTex distributions:
https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions...
JohnKemeny
Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
mr_mitm
I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars.
Also, typst is just really good.
josephg
> Also, typst is just really good.
Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a powerful enough tool. For example:
- Boxes & named figures
- Footnotes
- Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files)
- Comments
- Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of contents)
- Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.)
I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today. Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I don't want to manually add <p> tags around my paragraphs like a savage.)
Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!
DocTomoe
Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu.
When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.
LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly".
(Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)
Gualdrapo
I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM.
Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt.
Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
seanhunter
Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more.
I'm sure you remember that quite clearly.
ayhanfuat
Latex is not a company’s product. That’s a substantial difference.
__mharrison__
When you are the only option marketing doesn't matter.
I would suspect (based on my own experience) is that the reason folks shout "typst!" anytime they hear latex is that the user experience is 1000x better than latex.
js8
IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.
kyawzazaw
there definitely is. check any math or even cs department in universities
croemer
Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693
IshKebab
That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for equations and figures.
That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users use it because of that!
Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is actually fantastic.
creata
> That's not why people use LaTeX.
Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this feature, too.)
croemer
TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.
naikrovek
Computer Modern is the very last thing I will ever want in a document and is the first thing I change in every LaTeX document I create. It is easily one of the ugliest fonts ever created.
It has a lot of good things going for it, but it is the least attractive font that I think I have ever seen.
billfruit
But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.
kzrdude
Typst has some of the microtypography features already built-in and enabled by default, like overhang (character protrusion).
And there's another microtype PR open, by the reporter of the linked issue (nice!)
croemer
This might be one of the areas where it takes a lot of effort to catch up with LaTex.
The microtype user manual shows how much thought has gone into it: https://mirror.foobar.to/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/microtype...
__mharrison__
Didn't work with Unicode the last time I checked... Would much rather have Unicode support than microtype.
maxnoe
I've been using microtype with lualatex, fontspec and Opentype fonts for years.
What doesn't work?
billfruit
Asciidoc is also a good alternative.
Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements?
Major problems include:
- Tables are a huge pain.
- Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful.
- Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should give you bold and italic, but such composability was not happening for a some functions.
-Mixing of physical and logical formatting.
-Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.
phorkyas82
The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else.
Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)
IshKebab
Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.
misnome
“Pricing”, “Sign Up”
Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach.
There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.
kaoD
Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer) but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net negative contributors to free software.
So... yeah.
pbasista
> 0 of you pay
That is an overly broad generalization.
> no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc.
Again, an overly broad generalization.
I am unsure what kind of conclusion you can objectively make out of such generic statements.
pietro72ohboy
Absolutely agree! Money only becomes an issue when someone asks for it politely. And then people ask why such efforts and projects die in the shadows.
kzrdude
They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it
They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
red_trumpet
> sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.
goku12
Almost all of typst, except their web app, is available on crates.io and from many Linux distribution repositories. And you can skip the web app if you don't prefer it. There's no loss of functionality.
oytis
To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
__mharrison__
I find today much easier to contribute to (in the open source sense) than latex. Go to the GitHub and interact with the developers. Who happen to be very responsive.
I used latex for 20+ years and don't know how to file a bug for latex. Do I do it for xelatex, latex? Where? How do I update things? Download 4 gigs? Where's to documentation? Where's a book that explains how to contribute to latex? These are some of the issues I've dealt with and am happy to never have to again.
billfruit
Does it have better/easier tables. Does it support complex tables like with images in it, with alternating horizontal or vertical text in cells, tables inside tables, tables with alternative row/column shading, etc while still supporting automatic wrapping to contents, etc?
Arrowmaster
I recall a recent criticism of Typst being that it doesn't strip unused glyphs from fonts when making PDFs so they end up excessively large compared to other solutions. Has there been any change to that?
laurmaedje
That's fixed, thanks to a community contribution! [1] For what it's worth, Typst did have font subsetting from the start, but it was rather bad for CFF-flavoured OpenType fonts.
The same contributor has recently put a lot work into building a better foundation for Typst's PDF export [1], which decreases file sizes further, and brings many further benefits.
cess11
It's easier and good enough to just use LyX, a graphical document editor with a bunch of backends and templates, and if you really need to do something special you can still drop down to LaTeX and do your own templating.
It's published under GPL so relatively protected from corporate nuisances. Takes five minutes to teach someone how to mark headlines, add content listing and change document type, then a little more to teach how to add tables and images.
wiz21c
and maths shortcuts are really easy
herewulf
I'm finally updating my CV after years of neglect. I'm keen on switching to the route of Org mode -> LaTeX -> PDF.
It's partly because I love the simplicity/power of Org and I do all my writing in it nowadays, the other part is to separate the content from the presentation so I can have the content in two different languages but still end up with the same formatted document for both.
Anyone have experience with this or have favorite LaTeX templates for CVs?
I'm currently experimenting with this:
ykonstant
My go-to template collection is from Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv
My cv is an adaptation of one of the templates there: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7...
EDIT: ahahahahaha I just came across this cv: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/resume-slash-cv-tem...
IshKebab
Nice CV. Way too much text but I absolutely love the included diagrams. I think interviewers are probably going to glaze over the text but the diagrams are interesting and they practically beg for questions.
I'm totally stealing that.
subidit
Take a look at these templates I made a while back https://github.com/subidit/rover-resume
I tried to avoid custom commands and environments to keep it simple. Your content in org text should fit nicely with this.
It also has a template where the preamble is stored in different file such that you can try a different look by just un/commenting a different preamble file.
n2h4
i've used rover resume before. thank you!
xiaohanyu
If you do not insist on org-mode, then maybe you can try to organize your CV in YAML format with a tool called YAMLResume: https://yamlresume.dev, which transforms a resume in YAML to LaTeX and generate PDF.
boerseth
My own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun.
I never got into emacs. Is Org worth it?
goku12
Org mode is the swiss army knife of content markup languages. It does a lot more than just content markup. But keep in mind that org-mode, markdown, asciidoc, etc don't afford much control on final layout. They're like plain HTML in function. LaTeX and Typst include more layout control - sort of like HTML with a little bit of CSS. This may not matter if you're preparing something like an article or document. But you may want more layout control for something like a CV.
signa11
it’s not too shabby.
qiu3344
LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".
These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw text is very readable.
fsh
Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.
jraph
> WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.
I don't know, if your slides are just a few keywords in a few bullet points and the occasional picture / diagram, WYSIWYM is great.
I agree that you shouldn't turn an actual article into a presentation though.
mgaunard
Good slides is about good diagrams.
LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.
fsh
I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.
JohnKemeny
I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.
Gualdrapo
> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case.
I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the de facto standard of scientific and technical document typesetting.
JohnKemeny
I've never met anyone who's used Typst, I've only ever heard it on HN. And I meet a lot of researchers, teachers, and students.
Perhaps it's a programmer thing.
mr_mitm
> I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".
Don't you need to insert tons of `frame` environments to get anything worth looking at?
thangalin
> LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful ... pandoc's markdown
Have you considered writing pandoc-style Markdown that's converted to TeX for typesetting? If not, have a peek at my text editor:
* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... (see tutorials 4 and 9)
KeenWrite basically transforms Markdown -> X(HT)ML -> TeX -> PDF, although it uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX for typesetting because ConTeXt makes separating content from presentation a lot easier.
iNic
I recommend people check out typst: https://typst.app/
agubelu
LaTeX is great. It also sucks. I'm happy to have learned it and I'm happy to never have to use it again.
goku12
What's your alternative?
agubelu
For personal use, maybe Markdown + pandoc, or Typst for more complex stuff. For academical use I don't think there are any, because everything still revolves around LaTeX. But the lack of alternatives doesn't mean LaTeX is pleasant to use.
goku12
I don't find LaTeX too pleasant either. But what is preventing Typst from replacing LaTeX in academia?
aquafox
Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX, having written my PhD thesis in it. But with the current tools, I would use Quarto instead. It's much easier, you can still "inject" LaTeX and it's quicker for less technical collaborators to adapt.
enriquto
$ sudo apt install quarto
E: Unable to locate package quarto
goku12
I don't know anything about quarto, but you're missing a lot of useful software if you're limiting yourself to the distro repo - especially Debian stable.
enriquto
As a matter of principle, i prefer to use really stable software that does not change wantonly, and whose authors took the care to put it into debian.
My 20 year-old .tex documents still compile today. Will the same happen with quarto? (or typst, for that matter?) The fact that they offer no packages in the debian standard distribution signals they have likely succumbed to the awful trend of version churning, where you need to use the last version of the software or else. Thus, probably, in 20 years my documents will be un-compilable. For legacy things like typeset documents, it's reasonable to prefer legacy solutions like latex.
Once quarto and typst have stabilized enough to appear in debian stable, I'll consider them as viable alternatives.
tecleandor
They have a deb package (if you really wanted to install it)
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/releases/tag/v1.8.1
watusername
Check out Tectonic which is an all-in-one LaTeX toolchain (single executable w/ engine + build system) that lazily downloads TeX Live (no upfront multi-gig downloads). It's a breath of fresh air in the chaotic LaTeX landscape. Bit of a shame that they opted for XeTeX rather than LuaTeX though.
fryktelig
Honest question: why do you prefer lualatex to xetex?
watusername
LuaTeX is the de facto successor of pdfTeX and is basically a more maintained pdfTeX with Unicode support and Lua scripting, whereas XeTeX has its own engine. In practice, it means that LuaTeX "just works" with most documents while with XeTeX you run into all sorts of weird incompatibilities. Fancy packages that make use of Lua scripting (e.g., graphdrawing) will only work with LuaTeX.
Edit: Looks like it's not de facto anymore, and LuaTeX is now recommended for all documents and XeTeX is being recommended _against_ (https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex...)
fryktelig
Thanks! I vaguely remembered getting a bit of mixed messages with regards to the two last year when I was looking into Tectonic. I just read a bit into the github issues and it seems like the Tectonic devs happened to fork Xelatex and not Lualatex. https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/158#...
Anyway, what they made works perfectly for me, I luckily don't use any of the fancy graphics packages that use Lua. I use Latex a few times a year at most, and Tectonic just works for me. With my previous Lualatex workflow I had to deal with Tlmgr and that whole ant's nest, figuring out one by one which packages I was missing each recompile.
Seems like the main argument against Xetex in the article you linked is that it is unmaintainted, so it doesn't really apply to Tectonic, but it's a bit frustrating that an opportunity for ecosystem convergence potentially has been missed.
arthur-st
Having experience with digitizing a university textbook in physics by hand, this is a very nice LaTeX guide for everyone interested. One thing worth noting from 2025 perspective that the "default" local setup is most likely going to be VSCode with LaTeX Workshop[1] and LTeX+[2] extensions, and that you should use TeX Live on every platform supported by it (since MiKTeX and friends can lag). Also, use LuaTeX, as it's the officially recommended[3] engine since November 2024.
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=James-Yu...
[2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ltex-plu...
[3] https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex...
__mharrison__
Use typst.
I've migrated all of my latex (book layout and invoicing) usage to typst and couldn't be happier.
I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript.
The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms.
Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot to be said about printing an article to read. It seems to me that adding responsiveness to journal articles instead of using a fixed paper layout regardless of media might be a good improvement for many readers in many situations.