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Who is the most super Chad of solo code projects and why? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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Other than yourself. obviously.

I'm curious about the cliché or obscure superlatives with no constraints other than the scope of impact; could be positive or negative in some contexts.

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[–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

As a TeX hobbyist, I would argue that they serve slightly different purposes. Plain TeX is for typography, the workflow is that of low level control where your human judgement is needed for interventions and decisions. LaTeX serves a different purpose, it aides the author of a text to focus on the content while abstracting away the underlying inherent problems in fitting letters on a page. TeX is small, difficult, but simple. LaTeX is huge, with 30 years of abstractions built on top of abstractions, until nowadays few people know how to actually deal with an overfull or underfull hbox the right way.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    Yes, LaTeX is huge with its many years of development and layers upon layers of abstractions glued on top of one another. This is also why a new start was necessary, this is where Typst comes in, in my opinion.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    I haven't tried typst, how does it compare to plain TeX?

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Well, Typst isn't directly comparable to plain TeX given how low level plain TeX is. Typst also poses itself as a LaTeX alternative, rather than that of plain TeX. So, I think, it'd be more prudent to compare between Typst and LaTeX.

    For beginners, Typst is much easier to get into compared to LaTeX. Typst is also much faster at compiling documents. Error messages are also clearer in Typst. Typst itself is compiled to a single binary, so local installation is as easy as just downloading it and putting it into a directory that's available in $PATH.

    I might as well also mention that the Typst web app runs on webassembly (meaning that the browser does the compiling instead of some server), so there is no compile duration limit like that of Overleaf.

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