About the compatibility story... [LWN.net]

About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 17, 2025 21:26 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: About the compatibility story... by warrax
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

I think there was originally a model of fetching the packages you were using and storing them with the document that used them (and not continuing to update those copies); you had to go and get packages and get them again for them to change. As networking got faster, we switched to effectively having a local mirror of CTAN that you used packages from directly and updated periodically, which means that maintainers who aren't thinking about long-term backwards compatibility break old documents.

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About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 18, 2025 20:54 UTC (Thu) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

Have you tried modifying those .sty files?

If only the underlying language was something modern and somehow modular and encapsulated instead of a weird macro mess with not-really-scopes.

Maybe I never got deep enough into it to really appreciate its cleverness (now I do appreciate that it's 50 years old), but in my experience it doesn't exactly take just "not thinking" to not break something by an unrelated change.

About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 18, 2025 20:58 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

This. Unfortunately some functionality relies on external programs (e.g. eps<->X conversions). Those do bitrot.

There was ConTeXt as well. I'm not sure of its status. And "worse is better" seems to have been a thing for me this week in many venues.