typst VS djot

I may be a tad late, but typst does have a compiler you can use locally with your favorite local text editor.

https://github.com/typst/typst/releases

I am happily experimenting with Typst right now (https://typst.app/ ), which compiles much faster than LaTeX and with a syntax very similar to md, together with nice support for math, figures and advanced settings.

Check out [typest](https://typst.app/) if you're looking to write a book yourself.

[Hypermedia Systems book](https://hypermedia.systems/) was written with it.

This [issue](https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4224) and others like it are dealbreakers for me. There are numerous related issues, but the developers are stubbornly sticking to their interpretation—using the older definition of leading from the days of metal type, rather than the more modern concept of line-spacing. No other software or modern typesetting system I know of uses this approach anymore. This is particularly frustrating since I work with a lot of multilingual text, including Arabic, and it's very difficult to align the baselines when setting text in more than one column.

- Long-form, print-friendly report generation, including data visualization, tables and images

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

I somehow didn't know about https://github.com/typst/typst. This is a really cool project, going to dig in further.

At first glance, this seems particularly useful for scientific-style notebooks, which aren't our primary focus. If the demand is there though, I don't see why we couldn't integrate.

It's kinda early, but we're looking at collaborating with https://typst.app/ (a modern LaTeX alternative) on this. They already have some of the low-level PDF writing infrastructure in place, and are working on something higher-level that we're hoping to use.

(you could also look at using Typst directly if you're not tied to HTML)

I think that I need something in between. Recently, I was checking typst. It is quite impressive. But I am not sure if I need a better LaTeX.

I think the previous author is confused because if you google "Typst", you end up at https://typst.app, which seems to only advertise the web GUI and not the open-source CLI tool.

> Now, it’s certainly possible that one could develop a new, generative typesetting language that captures the virtues that I’ve discussed above and is free of TeX’s historical baggage.

Like [typst](https://github.com/typst/typst)?

https://github.com/jgm/djot#rationale

TLDR: single pass, multiple (identical) implementations on different platforms, HTML is not an implicit target, uniform syntax (including attribute syntax)

Yeah a nice Rust or Go-based implementation of Asciidoc would be fantastic. Having to deal with Ruby and Gems is not fun.

That's a mountain of work though and even if there is a spec, at this point it's complex enough and the Ruby implementation is enough of a de facto spec that I'm doubtful you'll ever make it past "this behaves differently to Asciidoctor" territory.

Btw a more recent alternative is https://github.com/jgm/djot which actually does have multiple implementations and looks like a way better option than Markdown, but maybe not as powerful as Asciidoctor still. I haven't tried it.

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