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0 pointscbolton2y ago0 comments

> Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years?

Yes! typst is actually better than LaTeX in this regard:

LaTeX: contrary to how it sells itself, it's not good at compiling old files. The TeX core is fine but the packaging story is awful. Once I found a beamer presentation about LaTeX itself, including of course some slides about the amazing backward compatibility. Well, the slides failed to compile in multiple places due to the fancy packages used by the author, which had made breaking changes between whatever they were using and my own TeX Live installation. And using an older version of TeX Live is not trivial. Another example: a few weeks ago a colleague found himself unable to compile a document that worked before the system (Linux distribution) update. It took us two hours to figure out that one of the LaTeX packages had made a change which made it incompatible with another package unless you switch the order of \usepackage. Fun!

typst: it's a single binary, statically linked. That's it! If you care about this, you can literally commit this one file (30MB or so) in your repository and it will run flawlessly in 10 years. The packaging system is very recent and still a preview, but it's already better than LaTeX since packages are imported by specific versions. And if you're worried that the typst package server will go down it's easy to mirror it locally.

> Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Very unlikely. A new PhD student may find it beneficial to write papers with someone who only uses latex.

That's the reason I mention. If it's the only reason left for learning LaTeX, good luck LaTeX. Very soon it will be "Will everybody one collaborates with also use LaTeX? Very unlikely".

0 comments

YWall392y ago

> LaTeX: contrary to how it sells itself, it's not good at compiling old files.

yes and no, that bit me last week, some packages decided to become incompatible. but in my case 99% of old files compile fine today.

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0 pointscbolton2y ago0 comments

> Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years?

Yes! typst is actually better than LaTeX in this regard:

> Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Very unlikely. A new PhD student may find it beneficial to write papers with someone who only uses latex.

That's the reason I mention. If it's the only reason left for learning LaTeX, good luck LaTeX. Very soon it will be "Will everybody one collaborates with also use LaTeX? Very unlikely".