[applicative]

Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting. Academic papers and books, novels, thousands of ebooks, have been written in single file markdowns for 15 years.

Writing directly in typst is good for small things with intense typesetting like ... wedding invitations, advertisements. But it doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers.

Writing is not typesetting.

All the forms need for the composition of all civilized text were present in word perfect 5.1, which unlike Word, Latex and Typst, permitted no typsetting during the process of writing. They were all recovered in the writers' markdowns nearly two decades ago.

[cycomanic]

I'm not sure what you mean. Markdown compared to typst or latex is extremely limited and using it for books or academic papers is very niche. I certainly would (and have for all my previous publications) prefer typst or latex over markdown. I also don't understand your point about not permitting typesetting during writing. Latex and text are the prime examples of separating writing from typesetting.

[applicative]

As an experiment, I recommend to you to put a markdown file into google translate and make pdf via your preferred markdown parser. Now make the corresponding typst document, put it through google translate and enjoy compilation hell.

[applicative]

It isn't niche. I'm an academic writer and there are thousands like me. Like all typst commentators on this site, you have literally just made something up. As for books, you could hardly be more wrong -- /thousands/ of self-published epubs on Amazon are written in absolutely nothing but markdown of one of the specialized varieties. The familiar markdown parsers know how to write out an epub. Self-publishing writers of all sorts have been principal participants of the lists for almost two decades.

I would rather use microsoft word than write in raw typst, which is no different from trying to think in raw latex - even if in some fields it is necessary. I certainly cannot write unless I can output to docx.

A hundred things would be completely impossible to me without a 'lifeless' text format like markdown. The inclusion of a turing complete programming language into document composition - the principal labor distinctive of advanced civilization - is obviously pure insanity, even if it is necessary in the mathematical case. What one needs are ways of introducing the exact features that e.g. wordperfect 5.1 had already completely perfected: paragraphing, sectioning, noting, emphasizing, citing, etc. These are the internal semantic features of actual expression of actual thought, things that must be preserved e.g. by a translator - as sexy typesetting need not be. Considier the question: What is that which must be preserved by a translator? It is the question: What is thought? If I am typing typsetting commands not relevant to this, I am not writing, I am not thinking, I am not constructing a reasoned argument: I am doing high quality page-scale finger painting.

For example, I now consider it intellectual malpractice to give advanced students a translated text for close study, without also supplying the original in parallel. I can do this by simply zipping two markdown files together header to header, paragraph to paragraph with a simple script making html - the original in, say, smaller type narrower column at left margin.

The translation can be changed or an alternative constructed or a new one produced automatically by one of the translation devices. This is an operation that is basically impossible with genuine typesetting, though each md file compiles to pdf e.g. via typst after a markdown->typst process.

This is quite as impossible in typst as it is in latex - huge projects have been devoted to it in latex with complete failure - the necessity of pagination introduces the necessity of precise knowledge of both languages if the page break happens ... in medias sentence - such people e.g. the Loeb library used to have. With html it's a complete picnic, a literal zip operation with a markdown reader -- but of course isn't proper typsetting. The merit is that html is unpaginated. The file for each language itself makes a perfectly sound typst pdf with a keystroke.

[harshreality]

How are you doing meaning-aware pagination if you're zipping together markdown columns?

A few minutes of asking an AI and writing a pair of simple typst docs with a few sections of #lorem() paragraphs resulted in what I think your ad-hoc scripting (in what language? add and your custom scripting to your collaborators' publishing stack) efforts do: a typst meta-document that pairs two simpler typst documents, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, each sub-document with its own column width and font size, paginated on paragraph breaks. You might balk at typst's embedded language, but it does avoid added dependencies and external scripting, and the language looks fairly simple a nice and functional.

It might require a somewhat different design to accommodate a marginal-note kind of thing with irregular vertical spacing not paragraph-aligned, but I suspect that's quite possible too, probably with some markup to label notes and align them vertically with corresponding labels in the primary text.

[applicative]

//I'm not doing pagination//, that was my whole point.

My own attempt to put a typst in deepl failed immediately as 'lang:en' when to 'long:en' and it just kept going, five or six failures in a tiny document.

The markdown files never have problems distinct from translation problems, except e.g. with setext headers. There is a reason for this, and it is in fact the reason why the tokenizing world of ai has a secret love of md.

[josephg]

> you have literally just made something up.

Huh?

I’ve authored a couple academic articles in typst. At its base, typst is very similar to markdown. You use == for section headers, * for italics and so on. I authored articles in typst just as I would in markdown. Then I do another pass later filling in tables and figures, editing and doing typesetting.

It works great. Maybe not for your needs, but it works great for mine. And I’m keen to try the new html support in typst for blog posts.

[applicative]

Except what you made up was something about markdown and latex, if you look, not something about typst. I gathered you know typst and said not a thing about your cognitions specific to it.

I wish you luck with e.g. automated translation and editing of your typst documents, and look forward to the compile fails when you use 'html support' on these translated files. There are many curiosa with the markdowns but also very very very deep reasons for the uptake, which is only increasing with the AIs.

[josephg]

No, latex does not resemble markdown while authoring. Text ends up intermingled with ugly \sectionheader tags everywhere.

Re: automated translation, you’re projecting your requirements onto me. I can see how automatic translation would be difficult with typst. But, I don’t translate my blog into multiple languages. So that doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is the requirements I listed above - like numbered figures, captions on my images, programmatically generated tables, footnotes and so on.

You repeatedly claimed you can do this stuff with markdown. I don’t believe you.

[Certhas]

So LaTeX also doesn't scale to serious composition by actual writers?

[applicative]

If they need to do typsetting, as mathematicians in fact do. Mathematics breaks the civilized opposition of content and format, because it involves the invention of symbols on the fly. Reasoning about this is actually quite simple but the typst brigaders have no experience with the history of the topic.

It is universal that the flood of largely automated hackernews typst brigaders cannot make a single post without flatly lying about every other existing instrument. On this site I have never read a single true statement by a typst brigader about latex or markdown, but I have read literally /hundreds/ of lies. If these accounts are real and not bots, the community is fated to die, unfortunately.

I use typst countless times a day, but don't need to lie.

[josephg]

> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years, except typesetting.

Huh? I roll to doubt. How do you do this stuff with markdown? I tried for ages but only got half-baked hacky "markdown extensions" which weren't even commonmark compliant. I've found nothing even remotely as powerful as typst in the markdown world.

[applicative]

I don't know, since I haven't used a form not commonmark compliant since the spec came out. Get back to me when you want to get your typst file translated or in e-reader format.

[_flux]

Typst html support is already available as an experimental feature, so e.g. EPUB probably isn't too much work in addition to that (as I understand it, it's basically zipped HTML with some metadata). It's also in the roadmap: https://typst.app/docs/roadmap/#:~:text=EPUB%20export .

If the translator has access to a service like typst.app, then I don't see too many obstacles for translating. But I don't have any experience on doing translations.

[applicative]

Why would I use a typesetting engine to output an epub or html? They are //by definition not typeset//, but the user e.g. increases font size and rewraps.

[_flux]

Perhaps you would enjoy the rest of the tooling, that may be useful in scientific contexts or in books discussing programming languages. Or perhaps you would also want to publish in PDF, like for an actual print book.

What kind of issues did you expect to encounter in translating Typst documents to other languages?

[josephg]

I’ve never seen a markdown based workflow which supports the features I listed. If I’m wrong, it would be easy to demonstrate it by citing some tools.

Just calling me a liar for disagreeing with you will convince nobody.

[applicative]

> Like, being able to write scripts, have figures and custom styling, populate data from JSON files, plugins, typography, numbered sections, footnotes and all sorts of other stuff. Markdown doesn't even support comments properly!

it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup - and you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles, calling a C compiler, etc. Why not use microsoft word? I find markdowns irritating in many ways -- only those are not among them. Why would I want an intellectual document to be in a programming language?

[josephg]

> it is plain you want typst or latex and not a markdown or any other so called lightweight markup

Yes, I've been quite clear on that point. Markdown isn't powerful enough for some of the writing I do.

Upthread you wrote this:

> Ordinary markdowns have had /everything/ you mention for close to 20 years

If this were true, I would have used markdown. If this were true, you would be able to cite a good markdown based tool which had the features I need. You have not.

> you were lying about footnotes, figures, numbered sections, and depending what you meant, a number of other things.

What a strange thing to say. Why would I lie? My needs are quite simple. I want a tool to let me write and publish beautiful essays. (And documentation and the like). Like this:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/

I tried really hard to make markdown do what I want. I wrote this with markdown a few years ago:

https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-go-brrr/

But markdown isn't powerful enough. For example, I want my diagrams to have captions. And I want to be able to reference to my diagrams from the body - eg "In Diagram 3, ...." and have the diagram in a little box which says "Diagram 3" at the top. And if you click a diagram, it should open a lightbox. I tried a bunch of markdown tooling, but none of it did what I wanted. The bare-bones styling of that webpage is a result of me getting fed up fighting markdown. And I just hit publish.

> It completely violates the concept that you are doing 'custom styling', typography ... you might as well add launching missiles

Bruh what? I want a good authoring tool. Something that lets me write words and render them as a beautiful webpage. Markdown is great for project readmes and things like that. But markdown is a bad tool for the rich, long form essays I want to write. The fact you don't know that isn't evidence that I'm lying. It's just evidence that you're ignorant about the tools I - and others - need to do our jobs.

If you're confused about my tool choice, some curiosity and humility would serve you better than vitriol.