djot VS typst

I know this doesn't solve your problem directly, but I recommend people to try out Djot[0], a markup language from the author of CommonMark.

Djot has a single well-defined spec, and most of the basic formatting has the same syntax as (a) Markdown, so switching is pretty painless. It has as a main goal to be legible and visually aesthetic as-is, just like Markdown.

What Djot adds is its _predictability_. Nested formatting, precedence order, line breaks behavior, nested blocks, mixed inline and block formatting, custom attributes are all laid out precisely in the spec in a thought-out manner. Till this day I still can't remember how to put line break within a list item in Markdown (and I'm sure there're more than one way).

[0]: https://djot.net/

Worth noting that the author has also created a markup language, djot.

https://github.com/jgm/djot

Every time I see people doing something with Markdown, I wish they just replace it with support for Djot[0] instead. It is a Markdown alternative by the creator of Pandoc and CommonMark that fixes all of the most egregious mistakes, while being legible and visually pleasant as-is. It is also syntactically similar to Markdown, which should ease adoption.

[0] https://github.com/jgm/djot

Are you using markdown? It might make sense to look at 'djot' as well: https://djot.net/; it's a new 'light' markup language conceived as a successor to commonmark; development is led by none other than John McFarlane (author of pandoc, & also led commonmark standardization) Djot makes it really easy to attach arbitrary attributes to block elements as well as inline elements; and the parser records source positions in the output -- all of which makes it really convenient keeping track of elements changing position or value.

I have a simple script that sends a djot buffer (https://github.com/jgm/djot) to the parser, if there's a change, on the CursorHold event.

Since you mentioned you were considering moving to CommonMark, have you had time to look into Djot (also by jpm)? Djot is meant to be easier to parse, and I'm planning to write a tree-sitter grammar for it.

Another recent development here is https://djot.net/ (by the pandoc author). It indeed thoroughly solves both:

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