I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

I disagree. The web app editor is closed source, but much of what it provides is open source so editing is a similar (and imo better) experience locally. The typst compiler and LSP and everything you need to use it is open source.

Imo the situation is more like if overleaf were also the people who made the LaTeX project originally.

I think the only possible issue with the typst org dying (assuming after the full 1.0 version so it's mostly maintenance) is that packages are automatically downloaded from the typst site, but an open repo can trivially be made considering that the set of packages used is just from a open source git repo and the closed source site just hosts tar.gz files of the folders in the repo. Not a big deal I think.

> implementing critical features in the closed source portion

Like which critical features, for example?

From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily.

Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.

I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.)

And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)

I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes.

In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever.

Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or working with an acceptable editor also helps.

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git.

Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually.

As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros.

I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.

Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

Just use Tectonic nowadays for compiling LaTeX source. It automatically handles these cases of compiling multiple times.

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy to gitignore.

https://mgeier.github.io/latexmk.html#running-latexmk

I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago:

    if [ -z "$(find . -name "*.bib" -print0)" ]; then
        # Just two runs, to cover TOC building, etc.
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    else
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        bibtex "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    fi

This is to say... I'm glad those days are gone.

mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point.

[1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/

Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code.

I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff.

Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.

Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.

I understand why people like using LLMs for coding, saves them having to think, but it is deeply frustrating to see it being such a crutch that some people cannot use new tools without it.

I suppose the issue is not new, many people didn't want to use new lanuages before because they couldn't copy snippets from the internet, but it was frustrating then too.

Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?

To be fair $x^2=1$ literally works in typst.