To become success story

To become success story

Posted Sep 19, 2025 8:34 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: To become success story by wtarreau
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

When I was using it on a daily basis 30 years ago, I *loved* it. Never having to think about what the output would look like and just typing was really awesome and I haven't found anything getting close to that experience. And I'm still pleased to read papers written using it, which are instantly recognizable. I'm also a bit suspicious about tools that try to imitate it, because, as you say, it has accumulated decades of expertise in what it's doing, so users risk losing great stuff.

LaTeX is great if you're largely happy with what it does. If you need to bend it to your will to obtain a specific effect, that can easily become an exercise in frustration – fortunately now there are extension packages which will let you, e.g., control how chapter and section headings look like, which was something that in the 1990s required fairly arcane knowledge of the insides of LaTeX to change in even minor ways. Similarly, LaTeX input is reasonably straightforward to write once you've got the hang of it, but it is an absolute bear to parse if you want to process it with a tool that isn't LaTeX itself. TeX input, if anything, is worse.

The main problem of the TeX and LaTeX ecosystem is that it is, to a large extent, based on ideas which were innovative in the 1980s, but the publishing world has continued turning in the meantime, and TeX's stability guarantee in particular, while commendable in principle, has largely prevented it from evolving along. When TeX was new, PostScript hadn't really been invented yet, PDF wasn't even on the horizon, font technology looked a lot different from what it does today, and Unicode wasn't a thing at all, but now there is no way around these developments. The solutions that Knuth and his colleagues came up with (DVI, Metafont, and so on) didn't catch on outside the TeX community, so TeX has been chasing what the rest of the world was doing in these areas, through non-standard variants such as eTeX, PDFTeX, LuaTeX, etc.

It is true that it is perfectly possible, in 2025, to use LaTeX to typeset a PDF document with OpenType fonts based on UTF-8 encoded input, but this means you have to run a version of TeX that has special code extensions not necessarily found in other versions of TeX, using special LaTeX packages which may come bundled in a “batteries included” distribution such as TeXLive but are not actually part of LaTeX itself. This fragmentation tends to make life with (La)TeX more difficult. Also, nowadays people expect to be able to write a document in a single source format and render it, without source changes, in wildly different output formats such as HTML and PDF, in a way that avails itself of the specific advantages of the format in question, and TeX/LaTeX doesn't really have a straightforward and obvious answer to that requirement like Markdown, Pandoc, or Sphinx (to name but a few examples) do.

I've been a TeX and LaTeX user for 40 years now but I'm looking at Typst with considerable interest.

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