It is not even near to what TeXLive (TeX distribution) provides [LWN.net]

It is not even near to what TeXLive (TeX distribution) provides

Posted Oct 25, 2025 6:49 UTC (Sat) by burki99 (subscriber, #17149)
In reply to: It is not even near to what TeXLive (TeX distribution) provides by JMB
Parent article: Typst 0.14 released

I understand your focus in comparing Typst to (La)TeX. But to me, the difference between the two is way more a reflecting the Markdown vs. *ML (where * stands for SG/HT/X) split. So while the latter need explicit start/end markers to build a proper document tree (throwing errors at you if the tags aren't balanced, though HTML5 came up with rules to handle misnested tags: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#an-in...), Typst follows Markdown where a document is a strictly linear sequence of characters, where certain patterns (e.g. + or - at the beginning of a line or a pair of characters such as * or _) will transform your sequence into a tree (and where you can't have invalid Markdown, just output that doesn't mark your expectation if you misplaced your special characters).

Markdown-like languages are therefore always easier to start with, but you will hit limitations (either in what is doable or falling back to start and end markers in one way or the others) once certain complexities arise (e.g. if you need to switch between multiple languages in a single document to achieve proper hyphenation).

Luckily there is Pandoc. If the simpler input representation appeals to you, you can always start with the Markdown-like document and convert it to explicit tree-like representation once you really need full control.

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It is not even near to what TeXLive (TeX distribution) provides

Posted Oct 25, 2025 8:59 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

> either in what is doable or falling back to start and end markers in one way or the others

The latter situation seems tolerable? Make simple things simple and complex things possible - right? Markdown style is simple, but we don't need to make complex things simple, only possible.

My impression is that the moment you go off piste in Typst you're writing code and calling code, which is back to the "start and end markers" because that's how function definitions work. When TeX was invented that's scary, even most of the mathematicians don't write code, some of the new Computer Scientists back then don't write code, so in TeX although of course programming TeX is how you get tricky things done, ordinary users don't learn to actually code in TeX.

Today every one of our STEM degrees offers programming except Medicine, and the only reason the Medics aren't exposed is that there is literally no room to slot a programming course into their timetable, I don't even know how they sleep - whereas we found room for the other disciplines. So Typst can just go "To do this tricky thing write a function" and the readers go "I can write a function, that works".

Crucially we're not talking about actual Software Engineering. The code in some statistician's Typst document is going to be of the same standard as their R, or their Python, a good engineer would be appalled, but that's fine because it's not supposed to be engineering, the engineering is in Typst itself hopefully. If Typst is a skyscraper, the functions written in someone's Typst journal paper will be like a bookshelf in an apartment in the skyscraper. Non-structural.