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Thanks, that makes sense. I actually just parsed aes as related to encryption without even considering how weird that was given the contect.

Yes, I will do that!

No, no, TeX macros nested within other TeX macros.

From past experience (may be different now): Typst supports SVGs that are actually vanilla SVGs. The SVG standard lets you embed a HTML page and CSS as a <foreignObject>, which only renders properly in a browser or something that bundles one (surprise!). This is not the fault of Typst and I think Typst is correct not to go down that route.

Just a heads up if you wonder why draw.io (diagrams.net) SVGs display as black boxes.

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.

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).

> 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.

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

> 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.

I cannot tell the future of typst and gribouille, but for:

> I'm fine with just text, then just readible equations below it, then an OK looking graph. I don't actually care if any of those are pixel perfect. I don't get it.

what you describe is fine for a readme or a blog post, but for books, scientific articles, or any long format, having a good layout and typography will totally impact the end result

I agree but to me it seems humanity has a terminal case of being unable to separate content from presentation. I can see it in this thread with clamoring for Typst in READMEs etc. If READMEs need to be anything they need to be plain bloody text. Markdown is the absolute maximum. Having some “header semantics” defined is fine as that’s universal in a document but let’s keep it simple guys, OK?

Information needs to be plain and clear. Presentation can be fancy. Let’s keep these very, very different things separate. AI will thank you as well.

If you've ever debugged TeX package conflicts because someone wants "that layout, except with those headers and this font", yes the whole stack needs replacing with something that does not hold all its state in global variables and has a sensible scripting language (LuaTeX never really took off).

My primary use for Typst is pretty agendas for my Toastmasters club. https://typst.app/project/rmyyeU17y51rl6ISSqGji9

Typesetting isn't just for science. I like that it looks good; I enjoy the creative step of experimenting with document design; and Typst is just fun to use.

> It's cool sure, powerful also... but when anybody has access to both vector-based editor and raster-based editor ... but also tools that incorporate them, e.g. rich text editors ... but also entire toolchain going from compilers to libraries all the way to Web based notebook with their editors and running environment that can then output printable artifacts, I don't think there has to be "the" way. They might be a more popular way within a certain zeitgeist but... does one project has to "replace" another one?

cool, why do you think people use tikz? And like generating images programmatically from text is impossibly more powerful than using vector editors.

Right; but markdown has expanded beyond that niche. Lots of projects use markdown for other stuff - like mdbook, or for blogs.

I think markdown is a great format for readme files. But for real documentation, the added features of typst are fantastic. 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!

I want typst for blogging, long form articles and documentation. Markdown is great for small stuff. But it doesn't scale.

The problem with markdown is that it's not extensible and that there is no spec. Essentially all READMEs would be better off using typst, they would make for better READMEs.