Typst and other alternatives to LaTeX

I’m curious how did the submission go? Given that journals don’t accept Typst sources right now. Was it a single-author paper?

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No, submitted a PDF version. Most journals in my field (biology) don’t even accept LaTeX, they prefer word docs :nauseated_face: for final submissions. But almost all accept PDF for initial submission, and I’ve had good success using Adobe tools to convert PDF to docx

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Interesting. If I ever had to submit to a journal that didn’t accept LaTeX, and especially if I needed the final version to be in Word, I would definitely author it using pandoc’s markdown flavor (what Quarto uses as well). It’s pretty much equivalent to LaTeX, with full support for cross-referencing, citations, etc.

I’ve been doing this for proposal/reports/abstracts that needed to be in Word, for quite some time.

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In my experience, for proposals they often provide you with some word document template that you must follow. So I guess in that case it would be difficult to convert from Markdown ?

Did you have a nice experience collaborating with your co-authors in the typst.app web editor ?

Not really. Pandoc is very good at custom styling with Word. You have to create a template file with all the desired formatting in it.

There’s always the option of doing last-minute fine tuning directly in Word.

One time, I had a very specific question-response template where the questions had a lot of weird formatting (colors, different bullet point styles), and there I augmented the process with a little Python script that concatenated their questions with my generated docx files with the answers. There’s Python libraries that do that type of docx concatenation, and then it was easy to tie together with a Makefile.

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Yes, with the caveat that I tried using their git integration (a paid feature) and it seriously screwed up the manuscript a couple of times. Lines got duplicated, some work got overwritten/ undone etc.

So I would not recommend that - otherwise it was quite nice.

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I’m using their Git integration right now. There is a button which I manually click to push changes to Github whenever I want. So far it has not broken for me.

You’re saying this broke for you? Only when various people were editing simultaneously on the web app or also when you were solo-editing ? Were you only pushing to the Github repo, or you also pulled from the Github repo to the typst.app server?

Yeah, no one ever was doing simultaneous editing, but was doing both pushing and pulling. Not sure when exactly the mistakes happened, but it was miserable

FWIW, I’ve been using the Github sync feature so far without issues. But I’m not doing simultaneous editing, and I only push to the Github repo (never pull).

I can also say that Typst has been a joy so far for what I’m using it (writing lecture notes). And I’ve only been using it for a few days, but it’s very easy to learn.

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Is it possible to use Typst via VSCode on Linux? There are some VSCode extensions for Typst, but I did not figure out how to use them yet.

Any hints?

Sure ! I use the Tinymist extension on Windows and Linux. It includes a typst compiler. I have also installed Typst locally to use it in the terminal. It works like a charm.

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Yes! Tinymist is definitely the way to go. Remember to choose “show preview” (or something like that), instead of looking at the pdf output. That gives you real-time live preview.

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