Modern Latex

128 comments

·May 5, 2025

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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 millis

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.

Al-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

BlackFly

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.

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.

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.

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.

eru

> For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?

You can change that as you go along.

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 tags on my text, or worry about how indentation will affect my rendered output. (For example, foo and foo 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 parahraphs, 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).

KeplerBoy

Because HTML is not an option. For academic papers you usually have to submit pdfs conforming to either a latex or word template.

flanked-evergl

[flagged]

einpoklum

> 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.

dochtman

Typst is the modern LaTeX.

https://typst.app/

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?

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.

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

Of course it is fast. It's written in Rust.

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...

https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

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.

billfruit

But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.

croemer

TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.

__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?

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...

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.

JohnKemeny

Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.

__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.

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 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!

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.

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.)

js8

IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.

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.

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.

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.

oytis

To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page

wewxjfq

It seems to have a bus factor of 1.

__mharrison__

Use typst.

I've migrated all of my latex (book layout and invoicing) usage to typst and couldn't be happier.

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:

https://titan-c.gitlab.io/org-cv/

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...

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!

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?

https://github.com/boerseth/cv

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.

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.

[0]: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic

fryktelig

Honest question: why do you prefer lualatex to xetex?

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?

iNic

I recommend people check out typst: https://typst.app/

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

yeah, hard pass

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.

null

[deleted]

agoose77

A shameless plug for the MyST Engine https://mystmd.org/

It's a document engine that ingests Markdown (particularly the MyST superset) and builds upon "structured data" for sharing.

E.g. SciPy's proceedings: https://proceedings.scipy.org/articles/XHDR4700

pbowyer

Just a note on MyST's citations feature as I was researching it this morning: until this ticket [1] is worked on there's one bibliography style and that's it.

1. https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd/issues/1462

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.