Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mjburgess 1255 days ago
As far as I can tell it compiles directly to pdf, which seems a non-starter for submitting to many journals which accept either latex or word documents.

This would need various compiler backends (perhaps via pandoc) to be that useful. Certainly it would help adoption if you could emit, eg., markdown/latex/etc. and others you're working with wouldn't need to adopt your tooling.

1 comments

Markdown is not close to powerful enough to produce all the stuff that Typst can produce, and emitting latex would be a massive technical effort. I think the best hope is that whatever journals currently only accept latex or .docx will start accepting typst files (or at least pdf).
One has to bow first and I do not think that journals and large publishers will be the ones. A typst <-> LaTeX converter would be something which would be a huge feature I'd pay for. I am writing papers for journals/publishers after all.
My initial hope was that this would be a front-end for latex.
check out MonsterWriter
Supporting multiple formats is a bit problematic though, if you want to process everything in the journal together to prepare it for publication. It makes the tooling far more complicated than supporting only one format.

It might be possible to have a subset of typst output to latex though, and then grow that subset. Like you could just evaluate all the functions to get raw text/markdown and then translate that to latex, and at the beginning you just wouldn't support all possible styling choices.