A short guide to LaTeX that avoids legacy cruft. Contribute to mrkline/modern-latex development by creating an account on GitHub.
Read the original article
Comments
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.
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.
By SebastianKra 2025-05-0513:572 reply 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.
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.
By meinersbur 2025-05-0612:211 reply Both claims are incorrect.
LaTeX would rather produce a bad document if it cannot produce a good one. Example: overfull hbox. A designer is still required who creates the documentclass, it is just that LaTeX comes with some predefined ones intended for scientific publishing.
HTML+CSS require pixel-perfect rendering. Example: ACID2 test. While it might have been the idea of plain HTML at some point (<em> instead of <i>), control has never been taken away from the author thanks to CSS.
By wtallis 2025-05-0620:59 You're badly mischaracterizing tests like ACID2. The test definition includes a long list of things that invalidate the test, including things like changing the zoom level. So it's wrong to construe that test as requiring pixel-perfect rendering when it explicitly doesn't cover exactly the kind of user agent controls I'm talking about.
Your comments about LaTeX do not seem to contradict anything I said.
Well, maybe they’re not printed by yourself. But many academics, often young people included, still print papers.
By SebastianKra 2025-05-0611:25 Which they can still do. Printed HTML is perfectly serviceable (definitely better than non-printed PDF).
Or are you arguing that there are somehow more people reading printed papers than digital?
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.
Note that this won't prevent the page from being displayed in other sizes, where it will most likely have a broken layout instead.
True, but with CSS you define one layout for the web format alongside a different layout for the print format, using the @page rule.
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.
We use CSS paged media to create e-books and invoices (using weasyprint [0]). One of the most helpful resources for me was print-css.rocks [1], they cover a lot of what’s possible and include which tools support which parts of it (tools targeting paged media, browser support is essentially non-existent and outside using JS to fake it with paged.js, not relevant). The expensive tools tend to support more features, but thanks to some donations/sponsorships, weasyprint has really caught up and now supports a very large part of the spec.
> Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation
I have no idea why you’d want to do that. Browsers are bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.
[2]: https://pagedjs.org/
By maegul 2025-05-0520:36 > I have no idea why you’d want to do that. Browsers are bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.
Fair! I was just aspiring to a place where web pages and documents converge more.
Thanks for the recommendations!
I'd say it's already there. See for example the https://pagedjs.org/ project which allows advanced typesetting (including for printing) using web technologies. It is already used in production by at least one book publisher (C&F editions)
I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic - nothing remotely professional, but you still have to start by making a book block, and Paged.js is a solid call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's usually my preferred first typesetting option.
As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production, I expected much worse of Paged.js than I found. It's powerful and mostly enjoyable to use! Oh, you end up with a large set of CSS rules, and it is not without bugs and gotchas (failing to specify a bleed rule somewhere at least once in every @page context subtly breaks layout; footnote layout is functional but automatic call numbering isn't always perfect, etc.)
You should definitely not expect to take Paged.js out of the box, slap a theme on it, and go; it comes as a box of parts with a mostly complete machine inside, and if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. I imagine the publisher who uses it must have some prior interest in web technologies, for example.
Nor is Paged.js remotely as capable or flexible as InDesign or a comparable tool, especially for the deeply rudimentary condition of web typography overall - something even as elaborate a tool as this can't really approach fixing.
But Paged.js is also unlike InDesign in having a much shallower (days vs months) learning curve for folks like us with prior web experience, and however equivocal a review I may now be giving of its technical merits, I do actually like working with Paged.js quite a lot.
I've also used pagedjs for a relatively complex booklet with bidirectional text in different languages, images and long footnotes. The result was great but there were some annoying bugs, some of them seeming to be possible underlying bugs in chrome and Firefox. Still, latex would have been even more frustrating.
By minifyre 2025-05-0521:43 Coincidentally, I've also used pagedjs for a project recently (125K novel) and encountered some bugs/minor issues. Overall though, I would say I had an immensely positive experience (because even when stuff broke, it was still just HTML, CSS, and JS--so I, like any other web developer, could fix it).
That said, it's a shame that the relevant W3C specs (see https://pagedjs.org/about/) still aren't fully supported by browsers (but perhaps such is the fate of niche features), but with that being the case, I'm infinitely thankful that pagedjs exists as a polyfill.
By throwanem 2025-05-0512:43 Oh, I certainly don't doubt that. And as I said, I haven't really found Paged.js all that frustrating! I have extensive though not recent Pagemaker experience; I expected InDesign to be easier, and now I rue the day when that's where I'm forced to resort.
In my experience Paged.js is at its best when building to PDF, but then that's always my intermediate format when working to paper, because that's where PDF's inflexibility shines. The source of a book block, everything that builds to that PDF, partakes of all the infelicities of the JS ecosystem. But to remake the book itself again, all I need do to start is print the PDF.
By jvns 2025-05-0523:43 I pay for a tool to convert HTML/CSS into PDFs https://www.princexml.com/ and it seems to work well. I don't have the best idea of how it compares to the various free options though.
By karencarits 2025-05-058:49 > 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)
> For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?
You can change that as you go along.
> You can change that as you go along.
that's not the point they were trying to make. you may need to change the display target for every viewer.
That's an interesting point.
HTML is usually distributed 'as source'. TeX (or LaTeX) is usually compiled to some other format first, before being distributed.
Yeah, I wonder how good TeX renderers would have gotten if page rendering happened client side in a browser.
TeX worked (and works) in batch mode on ancient hardware. Today's computers are so much faster, that this should actually be fast enough to run interactively without having to change or optimise too much.
By naikrovek 2025-05-091:19 Why does TeX take so long to render documents today, then?
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.
By tannhaeuser 2025-05-059:44 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).
By wolfgang42 2025-05-0617:261 reply 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.
By josephg 2025-05-0622:41 > 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 text
By einpoklum 2025-05-058:45 > 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.
Because HTML is not an option. For academic papers you usually have to submit pdfs conforming to either a latex or word template.
By setopt 2025-05-065:28 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.
By flanked-evergl 2025-05-058:131 reply Academic publishing standards are about as much of a joke as academia itself.
By KeplerBoy 2025-05-0611:42 Sure, but if you ignore academia, you might as well ignore LaTeX.
By SkiFire13 2025-05-0511:35 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
By maxnoe 2025-05-069:38 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.
By kzrdude 2025-05-0517:39 Is there a microtype (latex package) for the web?
By dev_l1x_be 2025-05-0510:223 reply 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 millisBy Al-Khwarizmi 2025-05-0510:493 reply 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.
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
By rlkf 2025-05-0512:17 > 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.
By Eddy_Viscosity2 2025-05-0511:483 reply 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).
By __mharrison__ 2025-05-0515:01 I used latex for over 20 years.
Typst is a breath of fresh air. Interacting with modern tooling (GitHub, discord). Responsive developers. Easy to read code. Easy to do things on your own.
Admittedly, my use case is mainly writing books, I've never published an academic paper.
By dev_l1x_be 2025-05-068:16 Until Typst showed up I was a heavy Latex user. My co-workers did not buy into it (Latex) because their claimed that using Google Docs / Docs is faster.
My experience with word processing is that spending a lot more time on UI bugs and incosistencies using any wysiwyg editors, compare to those any markup based system (md, latex, typst) is significant improvement. Typst is just simply faster, cleaner alternative to LaTex. I hope it gets much more popular.
By adiabatty 2025-05-060:06 The other option is people who never got into LaTeX get into Typst (usually by being too young to have gotten into LaTeX in college), and Typst takes over slowly that way.
By MortyWaves 2025-05-0511:501 reply 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?
By setopt 2025-05-065:34 Scientific journals do edit the TeX file. Both to update the visual style (e.g. enabling commercial fonts that they use for print but are not allowed to distribute with the template), and to update the content itself (to revise the grammatical style to fit the style guide followed by that journal, to update scientific references to have clickable links, etc.). Usually, at the end of all these edits, the journal sends a PDF “proof” back to the authors to verify that the final version is OK, or ask for corrections if they broke something (which they often do).
By jltsiren 2025-05-068:04 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.
By fastasucan 2025-05-0515:30 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).
By dev_l1x_be 2025-05-068:09 These journals have no incentive to include it. This is a classical chicken and egg problem.
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.
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.
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).
By creata 2025-05-0511:45 Oh true, section breaking is also important. And figure placement.
Things like default margins, in my opinion, are a lot easier to fix than these other issues.
By xiaohanyu 2025-05-0812:48 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
Typst is the modern LaTeX.
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.
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.
By __mharrison__ 2025-05-0515:14 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.
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.
By leephillips 2025-05-0514:12 Some is spent on optimizing the results on the paragraph, page, and multi-page level: river elimination, color balance, widow and orphan elimination, etc. I don't know how much of this Typst does; certainly HTML + CSS does none of it.
I'll put my finger on the perceived weak point: Which characters? Are they listed somewhere?
By cjs_ac 2025-05-0510:49 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.
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.
By koakuma-chan 2025-05-057:081 reply [flagged]
By fsiefken 2025-05-058:11 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...
By JohnKemeny 2025-05-056:354 reply Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
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.
> 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!
You can do footnotes in markdown [^0]
[^0]: it doesn't matter where this is placed, just that this one has a colon.
The table of contents thing is annoying but it's not hard to write a little bash script. Sed and regex are all you need.
Markdown has too many features> Markdown doesn't have enough featuresThe issue is you're using the wrong tool. Markdown is not intended for making fancy documents or blogs, it's meant to be a deadass simple format that can be read in anything. Hell, its goal is to be readable in a text editor so its more about styling. If you really want to use it and have occasional fanciness, you can use html.
But don't turn a tool that is explicitly meant to be simple into something complicated just because it doesn't have enough features. The lack of features is the point.
> The issue is you're using the wrong tool.
Yes, I think we're in violent agreement that markdown is the wrong tool for the job. That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using markdown, with its anaemic feature set (eg mdbook).
Even markdown + inline HTML is wildly inadequate. For example, you can't make automatically numbered sections. Or figures with links in the text. Or a ToC. And so on. Try and attach a caption to an image and you're basically hand authoring your document in crappy HTML.
So I agree with you. I don't think the answer is "markdown++" with comments, templating and scripting support. I think the answer is something else. Something which has considered the needs of authoring documents from the start. Something like typst.
I feel this about so many things and it boggles my mind why people often choose to do things the hardest way possible.> That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to usingHonestly, I think a good portion of it of the unwillingness to toss something aside and write something new. If it's just a hack on a hack on a hack on a hack then no wonder it's shit. It's funny that often it's quicker to rewrite than force your way through.
I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more. Because people will be asking "how do I make X do Y" when in reality you shouldn't ever make X do Y, you need to find a different tool.
> I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more.
I'm hoping the opposite, at least eventually. I think before long it'll be easy to get chatgpt to build your own version of whatever you want, from scratch.
Eg, "Hey, I want something kinda like markdown but with these other features. Write me the spec. Implement a renderer for documents in Go - and write a vs code extension + language server for it."
But if that happens, we'll get way more fragmentation of the computing ecosystem. Maybe to the point that you really need the memory of a LLM to even know what's out there - let alone understand how to glue everything together.
By godelski 2025-05-0517:09 You missed my concern. Even if LLMs get much but it doesn't mean the users will ask the right questions. Even now many don't ask the right questions, why would it be any better when we just scale the issue?
MDX as a middle ground with most of the text standard markdown and the escape hatch of custom React JSX when needed has worked well for me.
MDX advertises itself as "markdown + components", but its not commonmark compatible. I tried using it a few years ago. In the process, I migrated over some regular markdown documents and they render incorrectly using MDX.
I filed a bug (this was a few years ago) and I was told commonmark compatibility was an explicit non goal for the project. Meh.
By mzl 2025-05-098:07 I didn't know that, that is unfortunate to hear.
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.)
> For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format
Word still has a closed format. It supposedly standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually documented.
There also used to be the problem of different renderings on different machines (even if you had all the relevant fonts installed): You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc. I don't know if that's the case today.
Granted, though, hangs and crashes and weird gibberish on opening a document are rare today.
By DemocracyFTW2 2025-05-0518:101 reply > You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc.
When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we were able to locate that problem in the printer driver that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't remember the details but it looked like Word was adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to destroy the finely balanced lines of our print publication (yes, an official public health periodical by a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there was a lot of manual typographical work in each print). Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of: automatically adjusts to your output device for best results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed environment).
By einpoklum 2025-05-0612:00 > Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature or a bug
A bug, because even if this was merited somehow, they could have just made it a nice prominent checkbox for the user to decide what behavior they wanted.
Case in point, by the time I got at CERN in 2003, most researchers were writing their papers in Word or FrameMaker, with LaTeX lookalike templates.
In two years I hardly met anyone still doing pure LaTeX publications, unless the publishing body only accepted LaTeX as submission format.
Currently you will find that LaTeX is the de facto standard at CERN. Maybe only management would not use it. But CERN gives overleaf professional licence to each member. And all templates I have seen for everything I interacted with that is going into publications are LaTeX.
By pjmlp 2025-05-0510:20 Well, naturally 20 something years make a difference, although for some others, it looks pretty much the same, as I have visited a few times since then as Alumni.
By Gualdrapo 2025-05-056:49 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.
By seanhunter 2025-05-056:57 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.
Latex is not a company’s product. That’s a substantial difference.
By goku12 2025-05-058:49 How so? Only their web app seems to be closed source. And the company was created by the two project founders. They also don't seem to be doing a lot more than a community project.
Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a different comment?
I meant if there is no company financially benefiting from that activity it is hard to call that marketing. But if there is a company especially if it is backed by VC that is a completely different story.
By mr_mitm 2025-05-059:46 There is no VC with typst, they're bootstrapped. And I think by "marketeers" the original commenter did not mean actual marketing people, but enthusiastic fans. Unless it was a hidden accusation of astroturfing that I didn't get.
By __mharrison__ 2025-05-0510:17 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.
By js8 2025-05-058:14 IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.
By kyawzazaw 2025-05-0523:26 there definitely is. check any math or even cs department in universities
Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693
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.
By creata 2025-05-0511:53 > 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.)
TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.
A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people actually know it exists.
By croemer 2025-05-0516:32 Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still appreciate that they have a long battery life.
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.
By IshKebab 2025-05-0513:44 I think it's quite attractive, but its attractiveness isn't really why it's desirable; it's because people know it is the font used by proper fancy scientific papers. It's like the opposite of Comic Sans.
By billfruit 2025-05-0510:53 But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.
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!)
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...
By phanimahesh 2025-05-0511:302 reply How is that pdf made interactive? It has options to toggle the behaviour, which work even in an in browser pdf viewer. I did not think PDFs could do that.
By kzrdude 2025-05-0515:12 Good question. The github url is printed on the first page.
I find some stuff like this.. is it raw pdf directives? Literally an example of something typst can't do right now. I also can't read this.
``` \def\mt@toggle@sample#1{% \pdfstartlink user{/Subtype/Link /BS << /Type/Border/W 1 /S/D /D[4 1] >> /H/O /C[0.65 0.04 0.07] /Contents(Click to Toggle #1!) %/OC << /Type/OCMD /VE[/Not \csname mt@_compatibility@\endcsname] >> % not honoured by older viewers anyway /A << /S/SetOCGState /State[/Toggle \csname mt@#1@true\endcsname \csname mt@#1@false\endcsname] >>} #1 \hfill\pdfendlink & \mt@layer{#1true}{\rlap{on}}\mt@layer{#1false}{off}} ```
PDFs can do a lot more than show static content. There was one time where Adobe strongly advocated for PDF to be the page format of what would come to be called "The World Wide Web". Where we have HTML now, Adobe wanted PDF. Thankfully that did not happen. But I suspect it would have made more sense technically than [whatever this mess is that we have now.]
A lot of things are possible in PDF.
By leephillips 2025-05-0614:28 It’s cool, but using these features severely limits the portability of your document.
These interactive links did not work for me (using Linux) in the in-browser reader in Brave nor in sioyek, but they did work in evince.
By __mharrison__ 2025-05-0510:141 reply Didn't work with Unicode the last time I checked... Would much rather have Unicode support than microtype.
I've been using microtype with lualatex, fontspec and Opentype fonts for years.
What doesn't work?
By __mharrison__ 2025-05-0514:57 Had to use xelatex (don't remember why currently).
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.
By phorkyas82 2025-05-0612:53 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)
By IshKebab 2025-05-0511:07 Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications, but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical papers.
“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.
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.
By pbasista 2025-05-0510:52 > 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.
By pietro72ohboy 2025-05-059:12 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.
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.
By red_trumpet 2025-05-058:222 reply > 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.
By int_19h 2025-05-0620:39 Why is that a bad thing, though? To me this actually sounds a net positive for two reasons: first, there's a single coherent overarching design, and second, so long as their business model is sustainable, it means that the product won't suddenly disappear because of maintainer burnout etc.
By oytis 2025-05-0510:01 Yeah, today's open source combines the worst from corporate jobs and social media. Typst looks nice though, but is indeed developed in a logic of a business
By goku12 2025-05-058:59 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.
By oytis 2025-05-057:52 To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
By __mharrison__ 2025-05-0515:21 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.
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?
By Arrowmaster 2025-05-0518:021 reply 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?
By laurmaedje 2025-05-0619:00 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.
By matthewdgreen 2025-05-0522:07 I live in fear that one of the major typesetting services like Overleaf will convince people to move away from a very durable standard and adopt something that’s much more change-oriented. Then we’ll all have to learn not one, but two standards. Rinse repeat.
By wewxjfq 2025-05-059:02 It seems to have a bus factor of 1.
By flanked-evergl 2025-05-058:122 reply [flagged]
PDF is used for pre-formatted content with reproducible layout. HTML is used for dynamically formatted, dynamically laid out and often reflowable content. It's debatable whether PDF needs a more modern alternative, but HTML is certainly not a replacement for it. There are several use cases where HTML is not the appropriate choice - especially for carefully laid out documents or books. You can simulate pre-formatted layout in HTML, but it always feels like shoehorning an unintended functionality.
LaTeX and Typst are markup primarily for PDF type contents. Something like Asciidoc or even Markdown is more appropriate for HTML type content. You can always switch the purposes, but I never got a satisfying output by doing that.
By flanked-evergl 2025-05-0512:21 HTML with css paged media gets you reproducible layout without having to mess with Latex and keeps you in open toolchains that aren't two decades or more old without any significant improvement or advancement.
By flanked-evergl 2025-05-0812:07 Who prints things? pls.
