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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Science Memes
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Please forget LaTeX. Please let us adopt a more modern alternative that isn’t absolutely painful to use.
And yet MATLAB is still on the list 😹
I suggest locking your doors, a very angry crowd is likely to arrive shortly
I'm all ears.
I’ve been using Typst. Its (mostly) open source and much simpler than LaTeX. It’s still very new though, so it doesn’t have all of LaTeX’s features, but it’s making very steady progress.
Seems a bit early to declare an end to Latex then. According to you some use cases aren't supported. What isn't open source about it?
Don't get me wrong, Latex has lots of weird quirks, and you made it sound like there were a few obvious options to replace it. But Typst doesn't look like is ready for prime time.
I wasn’t trying to imply that Typst is a replacement for LaTeX. I’m more trying to say that I’m hoping Typst (and any other typesetting alternatives that might be out there) mature enough over the next year or two to become full replacements. It just doesn’t seem to be gaining much attention because of how dominant LaTeX is.
The main part that’s not open source is their web client, which I’m fine with. There’s a number of people on GitHub that aren’t happy about it though.
I see. It's been a while since I last used Latex in college. Back then Kylyx was still in it's infancy and I anyway had a established workflow with Makefiles. It seemed to me back then that the steady progress in user interface of Latex tools (like Kylyx and etc.) would be enough to make it more accessible.
Just like you have great coding IDEs nowadays with AI code completion helpers, something similar could be done for Latex. Incremental compilers for Markdown allow you to see changes in real-time in some editors, would be nice to have something of the sort for Latex. With these two and a context sensitive syntax helper (Clippy, but not annoying), and you have a killer solution. And one that is backwards compatible with all the tools that have been developed for Latex in these past decades.
It's just different use cases. A quick one pager such as memo, summary, short review, etc can all be done in a simple word processor.
Anything thesis-like or scientific, definitely LaTeX. What needs to die is slides in LaTeX however. That is definitely outdated and so restricted. Even libre office PowerPoint is better. But again, the power of math syntax is strong here. You're very likely to see that ugly beamer format in CS and math classes.
I don't get why people need to be in camps. Just use...both?
I mean more that LaTeX’s syntax and compilation methods are outdated. I’ve tried to grok LaTeX many times, but the most I’ve ever been able to do is make small modifications to existing templates. I’ve never been able to make a brand new project work. I’m really hoping that modern alternatives like Typst become more common. There just don’t seem to be many out there because of how dominant LaTeX is.