It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell.

I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current needs (or where needs just didn't change) is fine, but it's not the case of LaTeX.

I appreciate your postscript. I don't use TeX or vim out of nostalgia; I didn't discover TeX until I was a senior in undergrad, and I think I didn't discover vim until after I finished my Ph.D. I use vim because it seems best for its tasks, given the way I think (though maybe I think that way because I'm old). I use TeX because I write math for a living and have invested a huge amount of time using it, so that it's become intuitive to me even though I know it wouldn't be for a newcomer, and I can't be bothered to break long-established habits until I know an alternative will be established everywhere TeX is.

Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality typesetting with an emphasis on maths.

These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX:

1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.

2. Compiling is instant.

3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).

4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long items like our resume entries is much easier.

5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros where you need them.

6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc. just seems way easier to do.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.

Absolutely not a perfect solution, and maybe you're already using it within your Makefiles, but for anyone who doesn't yet know about it there's Latexmk[1] which is supposed to automate all of this hassle. I think at least on Debian it's included with texlive-full. In addition it has some nice flags like `-outdir` which lets you send all the crazy LaTeX intermediate build/aux files to a separate directory that's easy to gitignore.

https://mgeier.github.io/latexmk.html#running-latexmk

I think I used to understand this, but it's been a long time since I had to write any serious LaTeX, so I don't anymore. I found this snippet in my personal _quick-build-latex_ script from over a decade ago:

    if [ -z "$(find . -name "*.bib" -print0)" ]; then
        # Just two runs, to cover TOC building, etc.
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    else
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        bibtex "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE" && \
        pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode "$SOURCE_FILE"
    fi

So I guess if you're using bibtex, then you need to run it three times, but otherwise only twice?

This is to say... I'm glad those days are gone.

mitex is an option [1]. There's no way I could learn another notation, at this point.

[1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/

Typst looks good, but I'm actually going back to LaTeX but paired with Claude Code in VS Code.

I took a hiatus from LaTeX (got my PhD more than a decade ago). I used to know TikZ commands by heart, and I used to write sophisticated preambles (lots of \newcommand). I still remember LaTeX math notation (it's in my muscle memory, and it's used everywhere including in Markdown), but I'd forgotten all the other stuff.

Claude Code, amazingly, knows all that other stuff. I just tell it what I want and it gets 95% of the way there in 1-2 shots.

Not only that, it can figure out the error messages. The biggest pain in the neck with LaTeX is figuring out what went wrong. With Claude, that's not such a big issue.

I'm always worried about LLMs unintentionally affecting the actual content, so the extra effort of carefully reviewing the diff just isn't worth it. Markdown + PanDoc is more sensible to me if your document is simple enough.

Jesus

I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.

Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste.

Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.

The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.

Well, they are good in markdown and rust. Perhaps feeding some Typst documentation overview into the prompt could solve it?