To the people who switched to it from latex for technical documents (involving equations), how much adjustment did it need? I’m in the process of writing some papers/presentations and I’m fairly comfortable with latex but sometimes I do wish it was simpler
It’s much easier to get started than latex if assuming no previous knowledge of either, to the point I can actually recommend it to people in humanities and non-STEM in general. Syntax-wise it’s very different, so you’ll need to get used to it and look up the docs. I’ve been writing latex for ~5y before Typst and I think Typst’s documentation is FAR better than any latex source I came across: no messing with random outdated packages that are incompatible with your template’s, and don’t get me started on that bibtex/biblatex hellhole.
In Typst, most error messages are actually useful to describe the issue; you won’t waste time setting up your local build if you want to typeset offline; and the output is generated FAST - pretty much as you type it - which helps a lot with learning what works and what doesn’t.
The downside is that because it’s not as popular yet, it’s harder to find that magic stack overflow answer that solves your problem. So if you’re in a hurry with a deadline approaching, go with latex and practice some Typst on the side.
I want to use it, but if I’m going to commit to learning a new system for my work, I need to know that 1) it will remain open source (like LaTeX), 2) its going to remain maintained, 3) it has a robust package library, 4) it has to understand bibtex. I dont think typst has committed to the first, its not mature enough for 2 or 3, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to automate translation between bibtex and their funky format.
Without having tried typst myself, I would still recommend learning LaTeX, if you’re ever looking to publish in a scientific journal; most journals accept submissions in either Word (which in my mind is a very painful tool to use, especially when it comes to typesetting and equations) or LaTeX. They then typically convert the input to some internal format, but are probably unlikely to add support for new formats.
If you only ever intend to write documents for your own purposes, use whichever format you like the best; I personally use Emacs Org-mode and LaTeX export.
I've been really happy with it; I've been using it for templating reports at work for months now. I've just started experimenting with using jinja to pretemplate my template lol.
I'll probably continue down that track to try and automate my workflow away so I can focus on less tedious things, but after you get used to the box encapsulation it becomes fairly easy to work with!
It would be cool to have it also just navigate the web for you as you. Basically would start polluting all the trackers and if enough people used it their databases would be so overwhelmed. Seems like a good tool from a privacy stand point would get hard to really pinpoint you for advertising or whatevertheir other purposes are for tracking.
It has the potential to be the fediverse app, allowing users to curate content from any other ActivityPub platform in one app only. Do you want to see and interact with communities from Lemmy and photos from PixelFeed? Do you want only Mastodon and PixelFeed? Or Lemmy and PeerTube?
I know you can do that with other platforms, but they maintain their own content visualization, like viewing a Lemmy post in Mastodon looks odd.
I like the idea of separate tabs to see different content the right way.
Also, it’s easier to install. I remember the old days when Friendica used to be in Softaculous and other auto installers used in shared hostings.
Before it gets more love I think it probably needs a flagship instance. Friendica’s one of a handful of older fediverse projects where it is legitimately difficult to find an instance to sign up on.
Peertube as far as i can tell does not have a flagship instance, and seems to be doing fairly well, venera.social works better for me then another instance i tried which had random log offs and seems fairly popular.
Peertube absolutely also has this problem but I’m not sure general peertube instances really make sense at this point anyhow. There are a couple of hobby instances but if you’re not into that there’s not a whole lot you can do.
I remember when I could install Friendika (yes, that long ago) on a low spec web host. Probably 15 years ago, and it didn’t last.
Like you say, it ought to be the easily self hosted alternative to Facebook. The one you could suggest to your non-techie relative as a Fediverse gateway. Yet after a couple decades of development, it’s still esoteric and awkward.
I met the main developer at the CCC congress two days ago, and we talked about it a bit. The problem is that he is only a backend developer, and the front ends for Friendica are a really old and messy codebase.
I think the best option for Friendica would be to fork one of the available alternative front ends for Mastodon and adapt it for the additional functionality of Friendica. But they need a frontend dev to help out with that.
Friendica is a Facebook-like app? Which means you use your real identity and connect to real life friends. This also means all that data gets passed around to any instance that wants it via activity pub. Given the potential for abuse there that is just inherent to the app, I don’t think I would ever be interested in a service like Friendica.
composer isn’t how you deploy software; it’s just how you download the dependency shitsmear for proper packaging and deployment as a verifiably consistent artifact. Enough of the hokey shit, please.
github.com
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