[mrazomor]

LaTeX is simple if you:

- have a good template (most of the conferences & some other parts of academia provide this),

- use a decent IDE (many LaTeX editors I tried in the past were great, now I'm fine with just vim),

- stick with the basics (text, tables, formulas, images; it's easy to Google it).

The last point is what matters the most. As soon as you want to change the margins, stylize the table in a different way, tune the text so it looks exactly as you imagine, is when things get complicated. People expect M$ Word and get frustrated with LaTeX. From what I see, Typst solves this in a different way -- it doesn't provide the ability to do that (yet, when it provides it, it will become as complicated as LaTeX).

Why even learn LaTeX or TeX? The Internet is full of recepies. That all you need. Why learning new syntax for formulas when you have a mountain of resources about LaTeX formulas to typeset anything you need.

There are a few "solved problems" in computer science, and typesetting documents is one of them. The progress is made by building TeXmaker, TeXstudio, TeX Live, MiKTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, etc. Not segmenting the space.

[piz]

> There are a few "solved problems" in computer science

It's like saying transport is solved when the wheel was invented. Yes LaTeX is great, but it lacks so many decent things, such as good error message, or incremental compilation. Typst is going in the right direction, not segmenting the space.

[alephaleph]

I don't think the fact that you need to look up and copy recipes and download packages to do most complex formatting is a strength of LaTeX, and one of Typst's stated design goals is to make formatting composable enough that you don't need a package for everything. But guess only time will tell whether that works out.

The other selling point you're missing though is that Typst's compiler is designed for fast incremental compilation, which makes the Typst live preview and Multiplayer/Google Docs-style collaboration experience significantly nicer than Overleaf's, where a change to a large document could easily take 30 seconds or more to render.

[mrazomor]

Typst still has a syntax that one needs to learn (or Google it).

Overleaf's slowness is not a LaTeX issue. I was using LaTeX IDEs with near-instant previews more than 10y ago.

Then again, why such emphasis on the preview? Both LaTeX and Typst are not WYSIWYG. The content is already in front of you. There's space for improvement, but building new systems is not the most optimal solution.

[auggierose]

Building new systems is actually your only chance of achieving an optimal solution. That's why there is death.