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by kirillbobyrev 1189 days ago
This looks cool!

I understand that, just like any tool that has sufficiently many users, (La)TeX grew exponentially in terms of the number of features it has. I like the its core, and I also like the ability to write scientific texts somewhat conveniently. I haven't used Typst yet, but it looks to be something I wanted for quite a while: similar convenience to LaTeX and yet much more simplicity.

To be fair, though, Markdown + KaTeX and MathJax are kind of everything I need right now. Jupyter Notebooks can render enough LaTeX formulas for me to use it when I needed it, even in the university when I'm writing some CS algorithm overview/tutorial or need to do some calculations and hand it in with the explanation. Whenever we had labs in Physics I would do all the calculations in Jupyter Notebooks and that actually looked pretty good. And for my personal blog, I just set up the KaTeX + Hugo which I love: the convenience of Markdown + LaTeX is enough.

This being said, I'm sure there are many people who still have to write papers and would find it useful, but at least for me LaTeX is not a standalone tool that I would use anymore.

Also, part of the value that LaTeX has is an enormous amount of templates that I don't understand but I use them because I have to (e.g. when writing a thesis - it has all the right typesetting, formatting and so on) or because they look very good (I still maintain my Resume in LaTeX format. This is hard to replicate or capture with a new system.

EDIT: Oh, and also Mermaid.js which is now integrated into both GitHub Markdown and Hugo is wonderful for a very small version of TikZ. Although, it is very inconvenient for my taste, but it's still very useful.