MathJax VS typst

Developer tools point to MathJax https://www.mathjax.org/. If you disable javascript you can see some LaTex.

It is something we could add, but it is not planned in the near future. We also have requests for adding math notation (like https://www.mathjax.org/), and that could be a more general solution.

I don't know what Obsidian is, but if it's requiring old TeX math mode toggles (the double dollar sign), then it might not actually be using LaTeX underneath. Many tools that provide LaTeX-style syntax for equations are actually using something like MathJaX, BlahTex, or some custom system by which to translate LaTeX-like syntax into their own equation rendering. This often means you only get a pre-defined subset of what's possible with LaTeX (and the results are never quite faithful to how LaTeX would typeset them).

This will depend heavily on where you're asking the question, e.g. stackexchange has built in mathjax to render it. I'm going to assume you're intending to ask here (because that would make sense), in which case check out the bottom of the sidebar.

From the screenshot, Obsidian looks like a typical Markdown editor that supports some LaTeX math syntax, probably rendered with something like Mathjax. On the other hand, Xournalapp seems to actually use LaTeX, even allowing you to use LaTeX packages like graphicx, tikz, etc.

https://github.com/typst/typst looks promising, both the language and the tooling. I wonder where it will find its place in a world that is dominated by either Word or LaTex.

I hope in a couple of years we start seeing posts like these with Typst instead of LaTeX. It seems like setting this up would be a bit easier since Typst is much more concise than LaTeX.

[0] https://github.com/typst/typst

For writing math notes (especially in vim), I switch to using Typst (https://typst.app).

Here's a few points:

- The syntax is a lot lighter and easier to type fast. I was up and running in half hour after starting to use it. Once in a while I can look up some symbol name in the docs but that's about it.

- Empty document is a valid document. No preambles, no includes etc, it's all optional and the defaults are sensible. Just start typing.

- It's incremental. Live preview from neovim is in the browser and it's lightning fast, pretty much immediate. No pdf sync pain. No build files, makefiles and all that. Just start typing.

While it's not going to beat latex in terms of serious academic use, for personal use and notes it's close to perfect.

(And of course it's written in Rust...)

Except the main theme, which was HTML export? https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721

Though it's in the roadmap!

I don't use LaTeX for anything these days but Typst popped up recently and seems like a decent alternative: https://github.com/typst/typst

I am surprised that no one mentions the typst. It is super smooth with typst-preview.

I suggest you ask in the discord channel: https://discord.gg/2uDybryKPe. Or open an issue or question on GitHub: https://github.com/typst/typst