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A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive. (github.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 9 points 4 months ago (5 children)

This fixes a lot of the major pain points that pushed me to using Typst in the first place.

It's too late for me to come back but hopefully this makes someone else's life a little easier.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    There's no going back from typst

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    I partially agree. I recently started to heavily use typst for any typesetting where I have enough time to make a template. But as far as I know, typst does not support all the little things LaTeX can do.

    For instance hyperref can highlight links so they look different on paper and different in the viewer. Last time I checked, typst backend does not support using those layers.

    I also have mixed opinions on math syntax. It is great, but current parser implementation really wants you to put in some spaces that make the typing little awkward.

    Great plus is proper Unicode support. I remember having trouble citing chinese document names in bibliography, because half of the names wouldn't use the correct font.

    Overall, it's great, but I don't consider it to be direct replacement.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I personally never had a case where Typst couldn't do what I wanted and usually found something better in Typst instead. The only exception is to do curly snake-like rectangle borders, but it's probably doable in Cetz.

    As for hyperref, you are propably right, I would personally use a boolean flag for that and do two versions. Though the whole point of a pdf is to have the same look between it and the print, other features might fail depending on the viewer.

    I think the extra spaces in math make it more readable, and it's kinda the price to pay to not have to add backslashes everywhere. One instance when I found it weird was that frak("abc") had a different font than frak(a b c). So i just make a #let abc = $frak( a b c)$ rule.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I personally never had a case where Typst couldn't do what I wanted and usually found something better in Typst instead.

    Same. I love the structure and syntax. I did not mean to sound a bit like hater. I just wanted to mention that there are niche usecases where you might still need LaTeX.

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    • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    What's the advantage?

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    the main site has a section on that https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/

    • Tectonic automatically downloads support files so you don’t have to install a full LaTeX system in order to start using it. If you start using a new LaTeX package, Tectonic just pulls down the files it needs and continues processing. The underyling “bundle” technology allows for completely reproducible document compiles. Thanks to the Dataverse Project for hosting the large LaTeX resource files!
    • Tectonic has sophisticated logic and automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed, and only as much as needed. In its default mode it doesn’t write TeX’s intermediate files and always produces a fully-processed document.
    • The tectonic command-line program is quiet and never stops to ask for input.
    • Thanks to the power of XeTeX, Tectonic can use modern OpenType fonts and is fully Unicode-enabled.
    • The Tectonic engine has been extracted into a completely self-contained library so that it can be embedded in other applications.
    • Tectonic has been forked from the old-fashioned WEB2C implementation of TeX and is developed in the open on GitHub using modern tools like the Rust language.
    • Tectonic can be used from Github Actions to typeset your documents whenever a change to them is made:
      • setup-tectonic - Use tectonic in your github action workflows (supports caching and optionally biber)
      • compile-latex - Thanks to Vinay Sharma for creating the action.
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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    That sounds great! Making LaTeX more accessible is definitely important. In my scientific bubble LaTeX package management was something many people got confused by as well as knowing when to run BibTeX. The available Github Actions definitely makes it easier to not rely on Overleaf too much though it might also be too complicated for some. Cool stuff and thanks for the summary!

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    • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I can only recommend. Easy to use and error messages are actually readable by a human being. AFAIK, only problem is running external commands (some packages use them).

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    [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    I love tectonic, use it to build my resume via GitHub actions, it just works.

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    5 comments in c/opensource@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    If it's Tex, it's not modern.
    It's like:
    "We have Swiss cheese with no holes."
    Swiss cheese, or no holes? Pick one!

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    [–] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)

    Looks cool. Has anyone used it in earnest? I've always wanted to try a LaTeX successor, but the former is so prevalent that I've been concerned about it losing steam or not being compatible with journals, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    It's not a LaTeX successor, but rather an alternative compiler. It's more pleasant to use than other LaTeX compilers, but I've noticed discrepancies between its output, and the output of whatever standard compiler I used, so I had to drop it.

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