[natemcintosh]

This was a really great write-up, and gives me a lot of hope for the future of Typst. I think one of the best ways to overcome the enormous momentum of TeX is to point out its limitations (while still keeping an eye on Typst's limitations), and explain how Typst overcomes them.

[szvsw]

> I think one of the best ways to overcome the enormous momentum of TeX is to point out its limitations (while still keeping an eye on Typst's limitations), and explain how Typst overcomes them.

One of the other easy ways to overcome it is to provide as many templates as possible for journals. I’ve used LaTeX for years, but would by no means consider myself an expert in LaTeX, as I’ve almost exclusively been able to grab a template from a journal or from my university, and then just draft in the relevant blocks, write equations, add figures, and, rarely, add a package. I would guess that there are a huge amount of LaTeX users like me out there. I do all my drafting on Overleaf. I love TeX (and curse my PI whenever he requires that we use Word/365 instead of LaTeX/Overleaf)… but so much of the benefit, for me at least, comes from the fact that templates are readily available for any journal I would want to submit to; my masters thesis was built in a template provided by my university; etc. I don’t have to deal with any of the cognitive overhead of styling and formatting (except for flowing the occasional figure) and can just focus on drafting.

For me to even consider typst, it’s pretty much a requirement that there is some degree of template parity actively being worked on. The most natural way to approach that would be to just sort every journal by impact factor and start working top to bottom; given that so many journals share templates due to being within elsevier, springer etc, it should be straightforward to reach a reasonable degree of parity relatively quickly.

Getting the major publishers to support and offer their Typst templates would make me try it out immediately for what it’s worth.

[jedbrown]

Many journals require LaTeX due to their post-acceptance pipeline. I use Typst for letters and those docs for which my PDF is the final version (modulo incomplete PDF/A in Typst), but for many journals in my field, I'd need a way to "compile to LaTeX" or the journal would need to implement a post-acceptance workflow for Typst (I'm not aware of any that have).

[szvsw]

Right, I guess that’s my point: If Typst wants to compete with LaTeX, IMO it needs some sort of mechanism by which journals will deem a Typst submission acceptable, along with readily available templates for said submissions. That’s a big hill to climb probably, but probably the single most valuable development they could achieve from a product diffusion perspective.

[mr_mitm]

Typst doesn't even have a stable release yet. Give it some time, I genuinely believe it will get there.

[gnatolf]

Interestingly enough, e.g. Elsevier accepts latex but has their own typesetting backend. Which typically means that the last editing steps are quite annoying, because even if one is using the provided latex templates, what actually happens for the final typesetting is done by some mechanical turk editor on a slightly different publishing system.

[bombcar]

Exactly - they require LaTeX not only to make it match the style, but because the final document is a prepared LaTeX work. Sometimes you can even see all the hooks and such that are waiting for \include and similar.

[dmitriz]

Can you use AI tools to covert Typst to Latex? That would remove the acceptance issue.

[tkuraku]

This is exactly right. I like latex not because it's super ergonomic, but if I use a template I don't have to think about any formatting.

[okanat]

Until you need a table with wrapped lines or slightly different settings for figure placement.

[coliveira]

One of the big benefits of LaTeX is the ecosystem of packages, but that only happens because so much effort was put into creating a package mechanism for the typesetting system. LaTeX has a long history of providing the technical infrastructure for package creation, and that was one of the main focus since its inception. No typesetting system can compete with LaTeX without a focus on package and template creation. My personal view is that LaTeX will continue to be king in this area for the foreseeable future.

[okanat]

Typst has a far easier to use packaging system but the default feature set is already good enough for the most.

Don't forget that many LaTeX packages exist solely because TeX and LaTeX suck and they are very underengineered save-the-day type of languages. They survived since everybody else asked money for their better typesetting systems. It is quite similar to how Unix and Unix-like systems survived despite the mountains of OS research and many new, more secure (usually paid) OS implementations.

[coliveira]

LaTeX survived because it provides better results than comercial packages and has a much larger user base.

[okanat]

I don't think it generates better results than Adobe Indesign nor it is easier to use.

One wonders why LaTeX has many users?Larger userbase can easily explained by being free. Students and PhDs usually don't have extra money to buy or nowadays rent Indesign but LaTeX is there for free. It doesn't mean it is technically superior or nice to use.

[khaled]

> I don't think it generates better results

It does if one is doing typesetting math-heavy documents. Nothing really matches TeX quality or flexibility in math typesetting, not even typst (yet, at least).

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Yeah, exactly. Having used LaTeX for around two decades, I'm really eager for something to replace it, because honestly, it's very old and it shows (for example, among many other issues, dealing with non-English characters is still a pain, in spite of hack upon hack upon hack).

But if there is no available template for the venues where I publish (in my case mostly conferences, although also some journals) it's not feasible for me to replace it. Maybe I could for slide presentations, posters or other documents that I design from scratch, but I'd say that's no more than 20% of the time I spend with LaTeX. The majority of the time I'm working with conference or journal templates.