[cryo32]

Not so sure.

I work with a lot of people in academia who work with LaTeX. I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists. And the source material is usually just thrown in Word or LibreOffice.

The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not? There's not much reason to. And you will hit the same brick walls doing so that you hit with TeX the first time round.

If it is a greenfield, possibly, but all the orgs I've seen using LaTeX have been using TeX since the dawn of time and respect the accumulated knowledge rather than the distraction of a new tool.

[k2enemy]

I'm in academia and used to use LaTeX for everything, and have switched almost 100% to typst. Not many of my colleagues are aware of typst but a few use it.

I think there is hope though. Grad students are slowly picking it up, and they are the future of academia. I've seen similar transitions away from Fortran and Matlab as grad students embrace different tools than what their advisors use.

[Stone515]

Yes, I am a graduate student majoring in mathematics, and my classmates and I strongly hate tikz, especially when drawing relatively complex diagrams like TQFT. But we discovered cetz, and we really love it As for ordinary formula input, we usually already have our preferred snippets, so tpyst doesn’t offer much advantage. But for drawing figures, typst is really incredibly powerful

[cozzyd]

Until the arxiv supports it, what's the point?

[adamnemecek]

You can export typst as latex.

[lkm0]

> accumulated knowledge

my experience is the opposite. Due to LaTeX's arcane scripting and the lack of interest people have in learning it beyond "it compiles on overleaf", I'm seeing a lot of accumulated superstition. People copying and pasting preambles with useless packages, unused newcommands. Worse, people sometimes use their group's newcommands without being aware of the native functions, e.g. \beginmymatrix replacing \begin{pmatrix}. Even if change is slow, any amount of Typst adoption is good.

[cryo32]

If it's any consolation we use native stuff including pmatrix :). In fact most of our typesetting is very very plain LaTeX.

[adamnemecek]

> I haven't met anyone who knows Typst even exists.

It was released in 2023 and became polished enough to use like last year. Yeah, adoption takes time but the technology is significantly better.

> The problem is also momentum. Do you rewrite 30 years' of CTAN contributions, internal templates/styles and the toolchain off and start again or not?

With latex you have to rely on third party. With typst you can write it yourself (or with an agent), like writing functions is not painful in typst.

[cryo32]

Well not really because we have a few CTAN contributors.

[meling]

I’m in academia and I try to convert everyone I know… I only recently started using it for a few things, and I used Claude to do some pretty advanced stuff that I wouldn’t have ventured to even try with latex. That is, I think a lot of the relevant CTAN packages can be developed using LLMs more quickly than you might expect.

For next year, I plan to prepare a thesis template for our university and encourage students to try it instead of latex (most of our students use latex now).

[vatsachak]

Academia is stuck in the past in a lot of ways.

[esafak]

Just use it and advertise it; they'll catch on eventually.

[cryo32]

I prefer to think of it as mature.