LaTeX: It's Not You, It's Me

Ubuntu Summit 2023 Day 1 (03 November 2023)
LaTeX: It's Not You, It's Me by Martin Haug
Both the Open Source and the STEM communities have been in a steadfast relationship with LaTeX over the last 39 years. However, as relationships grow and change, sometimes we need to consider something new… In this talk, we will review the history and design of LaTeX and what choices worked great in the 80s that weigh on users now. The talk will contrast this to Typst, our new technical typesetting system, and other contemporary alternatives and prompt the question: Is it finally time to move on?
Link to talk details and author bio: events.canonic...
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[@typstapp]

Thank you to Canonical and the Ubuntu Summit team for inviting us! We had a great time in Riga!

[@a_8764]

Great talk, great software. I'll hopefully never have to touch LaTeX again.

[@gavinvales8928]

Such a great speaker, and you know so much about this LaTeX and other like software. It shows in Typst! 😊

[@le0nz]

Great talk. Really make you excited for the project! :)

[@VenSensei]

Been looking for a LaTeX alternative for a long while now.

[@BlueTJLP]

Awesome talk! Been a supporter since day 1!

[@mahdi7d1rostami]

I just used the web app to write the solution to a geometric problem in a neat way instead of just writing it on paper and was blown away by it's ease of use. For me BiDi text is a necessity and the only problem I have with markdown that had forced me to write in Latex was the fact that none of Markdown implementations have proper rtl support (you can force rtl for the whole document in something like obsidian).
Here just by writing "#set text(dir: rtl)" you start writing from right. I haven't tested to see it's extent of functionality but seems good.

[@mahdi7d1rostami]

Funny how at the end he mentioned rust being compiled into web-assembly and ran on client side. When trying it out I was comparing it to overleaf and was surprised how fast the compilation was happening. I didn't know how it can send the diff to server and receive the result back in such an instantaneous way.

[@elliotalderson6609]

Bro, first paragraph indent is the killer for this software. Like really strange you don't support it

[@JosephVFX]

What, you mean this?
```typ
#set par(first-line-indent: 2em)
#show par: set block(spacing: 0.65em)
#lorem(100)
#lorem(100)
#lorem(100)
```

[@elliotalderson6609]

@@JosephVFX why first line indent doesn't indent first line? Bro it's stupid. Don't know if your solution works correctly

[@HUEHUEUHEPony]

@@elliotalderson6609 solution works correctly tho

[@whiskeytuesday]

​@@elliotalderson6609 Indenting the first line of the first paragraph of a document is generally incorrect but if you do want to you can do
```
#set par(first-line-indent: 2em)
\
#lorem(100)
#lorem(100)
#lorem(100)
```
The backslash inserts a so-to-speak "empty paragraph" above the first paragraph. It does move everything down slightly but it works 🤷‍♂

[@elliotalderson6609]

@@whiskeytuesday Saying that this behaviour is incorrect is incorrect. Anyway, thank you for your solution, if I use typst I will try it.

[@eder3232]

But why reinvent the wheel, couldn't you do this with html and css, and use already established libraries that make work easier like tailwindcss, and use custom tags for certain things?

[@wertigon]

You could, but HTML is really, really, *really* limited, as well as extremely verbose ( consider a href="link" mylink /a vs markdowns [mylink](link) for instance).
This allows you to write your own tags which is extremely handy when writing a book.

[@mckdoeful]

You don't want to write math in html

[@iannieves8537]

pronunciation is wrong. not lay-tech.

[@judaronen]

Thank you for focussing on the important stuff :-/