Hacker News
Learn LaTeX in 30 Minutes
26 points by tzury
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9 comments
fabiensanglard
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I wrote three books with LateX. I hate this language with the intensity of a thousand suns. I hope Typst will be able to take over.
Pinus
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You take a language designed around the limitations of 1970’s computers and the absence of limitations of Donald Knuth’s brain, and then you build a document system on top of that. What could possibly go wrong? =)
Rochus
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> I hate this language with the intensity of a thousand suns
Interesting. What's the main reason? Do you already have representative experience with Typst? Does it really solve the issues you perceived with Latex? Are you satisfied with the typographic quality of Typst? (why I'm interested: https://github.com/rochus-keller/typos/)
gucci-on-fleek
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> https://github.com/rochus-keller/typos/
The following projects have somewhat similar goals, so they might be worth looking into:
https://github.com/vlasakm/mmtex
Rochus
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Thanks for the hints. The projects have different goals. My goal is to use a stand-alone luatex engine and integrate it with my new typesetting language, completely replacing TeX. MMTeX still uses TeX, but make an easier to install package using the OpTeX format; that's a very good approach for people who want to use OpTeX and don't care about the whole TexLive machinery. Speedata is closest to what I intend, but their language is XML based and optimized for catalogues, and they depend on a pre-existing luatex installation (so they could use mine instead). LuaMetaTeX is the successor of LuaTeX which essentially moves more implementation to Lua. To my surprise, I actually didn't find a pre-existing project so far which shares my goals.
patrickg
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(Author of speedata Publisher here)
Just a small note: the speedata Publisher ships with a LuaTeX, so you don't need it pre-installed.
Rochus
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Cool, good to know. But I assume you use a standard version, part of TexLive or a subset thereof? What libraries in addition to the luatex executable to you need? I'm currently integrating the fontloader into the executable binary so that I don't have to deploy a directory structure.