Another project with similar aims

Posted Sep 17, 2025 19:35 UTC (Wed) by spacefrogg (subscriber, #119608)
In reply to: Another project with similar aims by rogerwhittaker
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

One of the most obvious differences between TeX (and SILE as far as I can see) and Typst is that the latter has a proper separation between code syntax and typesetting syntax. This, for the uninitiated, is a point of constant frustration in *TeX, with macro definitions producing unwanted output. Code has lexically scoped variables, lambda expressions and much of the 21st century quality-of-life features. It would be interesting to know how SILE does in that regard.

Additionally, Typst documents are closer in code style to plain TeX than LaTeX with its verbose Pascal'ish blocks.

Anecdote: I had to write a letter, printed, on paper, just the other day. Had a go at using Typst and it was done in 20 minutes incl. downloading the letter package, initialising the document boilerplate and understanding what to change where. It looks like simple tasks are actually simple to do.

Another project with similar aims

Posted Sep 18, 2025 10:10 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

So Typst is still a Turing-complete programming language? It would seem cleaner to have something less powerful, or at least define a subset without fully general macros that's good enough for 80% of documents. I think that gives a better chance of forward compatibility too: some of the unhappy experiences with LaTeX bitrot are because LaTeX packages can do anything at all, so it's hard to guarantee that a new version works the same, or to automatically convert documents from old to new.

Another project with similar aims

Posted Sep 18, 2025 12:41 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

The first company I worked at was a browser company who thought that you could meet 80% of all document pages with something simple. What we learned was that what we thought was an 80% solution really only covered 20% of the actual document space. This seems to have been the case with many other attempts I have seen over the years. You can add a couple of items in a highly opionated method of 'this is our one true way' but you quickly find that there are conflicting 'choices' in how people visually perceive layout.. In the end you either accidentally create a turing complete language or put one in on purpose.

Another project with similar aims

Posted Sep 19, 2025 9:19 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

I would argue it is the opposite. Every "purely declarative" or "deliberately not Turing-complete" language eventually gets turned into one anyway because otherwise you lack too much expressive power so you either have the choice of doing so deliberately from the start or doing so accidentally with bad ergonomics later.