this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
1199 points (96.9% liked)

Science Memes

11278 readers
3578 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
1199
despite all my rage IT keeps me trapped like a rat in a cage. (mander.xyz)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
191 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I’ve been using Typst. Its (mostly) open source and much simpler than LaTeX. It’s still very new though, so it doesn’t have all of LaTeX’s features, but it’s making very steady progress.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Seems a bit early to declare an end to Latex then. According to you some use cases aren't supported. What isn't open source about it?

Don't get me wrong, Latex has lots of weird quirks, and you made it sound like there were a few obvious options to replace it. But Typst doesn't look like is ready for prime time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wasn’t trying to imply that Typst is a replacement for LaTeX. I’m more trying to say that I’m hoping Typst (and any other typesetting alternatives that might be out there) mature enough over the next year or two to become full replacements. It just doesn’t seem to be gaining much attention because of how dominant LaTeX is.

The main part that’s not open source is their web client, which I’m fine with. There’s a number of people on GitHub that aren’t happy about it though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I see. It's been a while since I last used Latex in college. Back then Kylyx was still in it's infancy and I anyway had a established workflow with Makefiles. It seemed to me back then that the steady progress in user interface of Latex tools (like Kylyx and etc.) would be enough to make it more accessible.

Just like you have great coding IDEs nowadays with AI code completion helpers, something similar could be done for Latex. Incremental compilers for Markdown allow you to see changes in real-time in some editors, would be nice to have something of the sort for Latex. With these two and a context sensitive syntax helper (Clippy, but not annoying), and you have a killer solution. And one that is backwards compatible with all the tools that have been developed for Latex in these past decades.