I’ve used LyX for some 15 years; before that, I used Scientific WorkPlace - SWP - for some 15+ years. I see the advantages of Overleaf, but I dislike writing documents in an ASCII editor – I want to be able to see the document structure as I type (e.g., headlines for ease of navigation), and I always had to make 2-3 attempts with tables or multiline equations before I got them right prior to SWP.
There are a few things I miss with LyX, though:
I’d like to be able to put unicode (Julia) characters in program listings - perhaps doable today, but not very easy.
I’d like to be able to do literate programming, i.e., open a Julia session window in the LyX document and rund the code (kind of similar to Quarto, etc.). SWP came originally with Maple, and it was possible to execute symbolic computations via Maple. At some stage, this changed to MuPAD – MuPAD was then bought by MathWorks and became the MATLAB Symbolic Toolbox. Perhaps it is possible to link LyX to Maple, Mathematica, or similar. I’d like to be able to run Julia within LyX.
To me, LyX is not very easy to use when it comes to using various LaTeX templates for conferences, etc. – essentially one needs some expertise to make the “WYSIWYM” interface integrated with the templates.
LyX has some support for revision, with acceptance/rejection of changes introduced by other authors, but it is not possible to do it on-line out-of-the-box like in, say, Word.
There are some issues with LyX when it comes to handling SVG-files. SVG files generated by Julia work perfectly, but SVG drawings in, say, Inkscape, often become messed up when it comes to arrows.
I don’t mean to change the topic from Typst, but I like LyX quite a bit. And if someone with more experience knows how to get around the above “shortcomings” of LyX, I’d be happy to learn.
A bit late to the party, but for me, typst looks very interesting in the long run.
What hasn’t been mentioned here so far (I think): Does anyone have experience with TikZ-like functionality in typst?
I heard that there are some similar packages in the making (cetz – Typst Universe), but I have no feeling for how versatile they are as of today. As someone who enjoys making diagrams and plots directly in LaTeX via TikZ or PGF, but thinks the coding experience could be a bit smoother, I’m somewhat hopeful that typst can offer similar features at some point with lighter syntax.
But considering how much of a juggernaut the TikZ/PGF combination is and how ergonomic (for LaTeX standads) the syntax feels once you get used to it, I’m still not sure if there will ever be a full replacement for that. I mean … the combined documentation of these two packages has a whopping 1,322 pages and a brilliant HTML version (https://tikz.dev/).
I made this in CeTZ. I’ve only used TikZ a hand full of times and stumbled my way through it. This was much easier. However, to a TikZ power user I suspect it falls short.
Just wondering how PDF24 works as a free alternative to Acrobat? I just tried it as a round trip Word → PDF → Word and it seemed good with just a cursory review of the results.
Good to know this exists! I have free access to Adobe products through my employer (a college), and actually I just used their web tool without signing in. But that was just for expedience, I didn’t rigorously compare.
I’ve made a pretty generic manuscript quarto template that uses Typst to render the pdf and have found it works pretty nicely. It’s here in case you want to explore how this might work for your context. I usually save the intermediate .typ files and can use pandoc to convert to .docx if necessary, though it doesn’t always play nicely with Typst tables, so I often revert to Adobe exports if I need a .docx file.
There is also TeXMacs and its faster fork Mogan. It has a built-in vector graphics editor, can do animations, can work like Jupyter notebook for various languages, including many computer algebra software. It can import and export LaTeX, with some limitations.
I am curious if anyone uses it. It has been around since 1999 and became usable around 2003…
I think the Typst community is full of Latex users. To be convinced, look at all the journal templates that have been created. I have been using Typst on a daily basis for about a year now, and I use it for everything except journal papers, for which I still use Latex.
Typst is really easy to use and creating templates that fit your needs (letters, books, presentations, posters, …) is a breeze. Of course Typst is still in its infancy, but I think for 90% of users (that’s my 2 cents ) Typst is on par with Latex.
Last but not least, the Typst executable is really light (~30Mb).
I am not an evangelist. I just encourage you to try it and make up your own mind.
Unfortunately I often find it to be buggy. Sometimes it just won’t start on Apple Silicon Macs. I have to completely reinstall and remove data directories and so on and hope that it works again. Eventually I just gave up on it. They also haven’t released any updates since forever … I don’t think it has a strong maintainer support ?
The main problem I have with LaTeX isn’t the syntax and the entering of maths, but how hard it is to script, and to make templates and packages.
If Typst has significantly better scripting capabilities, and perhaps even better package interoperability, I could see it quickly making significant strides towards catching up with LaTeX.
If you want an example of how to create a template, you can check the template of the Latex elsearticle.cls translation I published on Typst Universe. The code is available [here] (GitHub - maucejo/elsearticle).
Fun fact: I discovered Typst thanks to Julia discourse
Yes, the speed at which new packages/templates are developed for typst suggests that it is a highly extensible and programmer-friendly environment (as opposed to TeX, which is highly extensible only by the standards of 1980, and can be a nightmare for programmers). It may quickly overtake LaTeX, not in the number of packages but effective user experience (CTAN has 2k+ packages, but it is arguable that many of them are legacy, very, very niche, and or incompatible with each other).
In the same vein, it is impressive how empowering Rust is. Given the timeline and one prominent contributor, the core of typst was probably written in something less than 20k person-hours (maybe much less). Which is nothing short of amazing.
That’s the point ! I made this template as an exercise to learn Typst. However, I continue writing my papers in Latex, because editors only accept Latex or Word.
The idea is to prove that Typst can produce high quality formatted papers. I think that is why Latex templates are translated in Typst.
I’m afraid typst is an absolute non-starter for me if I can’t get conversion to LaTeX. Its scripting looks like an enormous boon, but without having LaTeX to submit to those publishers who require it, one cannot commit to typst.
I imagine that publishers will accept it in due course. After all, it is but a few years old at this point and many people haven’t even heard about it.
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly or slowly it ends up getting attention from publishers. As far as I’m aware, most of the big academic publishers don’t even actually use LaTeX internally, they have their own custom markup languages that they convert to from your LaTeX source. Because their internal processes might not have to change much, it might not end up being such a big deal for them to accept Typst manuscripts if they’re convinced there’s a legitimate business case for it.
But before they do anything, they need to be convinced there’s a reason to do it, so academic publishing is going to be one of the last areas where Typst will be able to displace LaTeX.
The way I see this going is that first it’ll have to gain prominence in the sphere of personal use, and scenarios where you can submit a PDF (e.g. university assignments, work reports, a thesis, preprints to the Arxiv), and then people who adopt it there will have to be the ones applying pressure to publishers to support it.
) Typst is on par with Latex.
. It’s a wysiwyg editor.