News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement by henrebotha on Saturday September 27, 2025 @11:00AM (#45396273)
If you're going to do this, might as well go with AsciiDoc instead. It's vastly superior as a syntax. Markdown breaks down at the mere mention of something as trivial as a nested list item containing a table of blockquotes.
Re:Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement by GavinMcG on Saturday September 27, 2025 @02:29PM (#45398274)
Not that it couldn’t be trivial in the abstract, but I’m struggling to imagine a use for a nested list item containing a table of blockquotes. It doesn’t seem at all surprising that a tool wouldn’t anticipate that.
Re:Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement by shakna on Sunday September 28, 2025 @10:39AM (#45404660)
Things from the design world, like Acceptance Criteria would happily require it.
Re:Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement by GavinMcG on Sunday September 28, 2025 @04:39PM (#45407782)
Is a lightweight easy-to-read plain text markup language the right tool for that job?
Re:Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement by shakna on Sunday September 28, 2025 @04:48PM (#45407853)
Absolutely! The writers are generally not highly technically experienced, but have to produce highly technical documents that need to be regularly reviewed and changed for years at a time.
Re:Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement by eslaught on Saturday September 27, 2025 @09:28PM (#45400973)
If you're going to do this, why not generate Pandoc ASTs directly? You can do so from a number of languages and they support (by definition) a superset of any given markup's features, with blocks to call out directly for things you can only do in Latex.

I assume the original question is asking about programmatic document generation, in which case working with a real AST is probably also a productivity and reliability win as well.