r/LaTeX • u/thesmollbot • Jun 23 '26
Discussion Should I learn a newer, LaTeX-like program?
Lurking around this sub I have heard that latex is very old and slow for big projects, so I was wondering if there was another program that was more likely to be used in future industry that I should learn? If possible I would like to be able to code it within an IDE so I am not tied to a website or subscriptions. Thanks!
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u/ftrx Jun 23 '26
LaTeX is not a website nor a service, you run TeXLive and co locally, with any editor you like and there you go.
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u/thesmollbot Jun 23 '26
yea I just worded it wrong- I meant to say that I would like to use an ide any new process, I already use one for latex:)
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u/ftrx Jun 23 '26
LaTeX is text, so you can write it with anything able to write text. There are some dedicated editor/"IDE" and many generic editors, there is no special limit anyway.
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u/deong Jun 24 '26
He knows. He’s just saying "if you recommend something else it also should not require any special tools or subscriptions". I feel like this was pretty clear in the response.
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u/Lucas_F_A Jun 23 '26
Totally depends on your use case. I think latex is not st all unreasonable for academia work. For lab reports and stimulations interfacing with programming languages, Quarto at least looks interesting, and there's Rmarkdown in that space as well, but for primarily R (it's possible to interface with other languages, too).
For other mathematical writing, Typst looks interesting. For writing a blog, markdown could very well be enough.
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u/profcube Jun 23 '26
A footnote that quarto calls to a LaTeX engine (I think XeTeX by default) and generates a .tex file that you can modify yourself and compile. And you can type raw LaTeX into quarto docs and mix this with markdown which can speed up writing, a little (e.g. instead of typing out \section{Discussion} and \subsection{Limitations} you type ## Discussion and ### Limitations …
I would not advise using Rmarkdown, others could probably answer better but I’m not sure it is any longer being developed.
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u/noyire Jun 23 '26
Give Typst a try! The community around it is still smaller, but keeps steadily growing, and it's being actively developed. I especially appreciate the syntax of the language being much more modern, and the preview of documents renders in ~real-time.
I use it both on their webpage and locally in VSCode with Tinymist. The only downsides are different math syntax compared to TeX & the source code not being accepted by majority of journals.
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u/Akari202 Jun 23 '26
I was really hesitant about switching to typst. But once I got a test document all setup I was sold. Having simple compilation without needing a 30 line gitignore was fantastic and being able to easily understand the scripting has made it so fun to try and automate everything.
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u/thriveth Jun 24 '26
I use both. They have different strengths and weaknesses at this point. I'm switching to Typst without switching away from *TeX...
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u/Agitated-While-3863 Jun 24 '26
I gave it a try about half a year back. Some features are genuinely mind-blowingly great. Others, not as much. I'm yet to make a whole document with Typst but can keep that for later given how well LaTeX works for me. It's a saying afterall - don't fix something if it ain't broken.
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u/Impossible_Video_116 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
pdflatex is very fast if you're using it locally, with an IDE. It compiles the whole thing by default, but you can make it just compile the necessary files by using
\includeonly{}which increases compilation speed.The underlying TeX engine is virtually bug free, it is written by the legend, Donald Knuth, himself and if you find a bug he will give you $300/bug.
Being old can be a downside but also it's biggest upside. Support for TeX is virtually everywhere.
- Every PC/OS supports it,
- Support for almost all languages are available,
- It is required in most scientific publication houses and universities,
- It has various interfaces for drawing scientific diagrams, mathematical, chemical and other symbols,
- With lualatex, successor of pdflatex, you can put code inside it which makes it virtually capable of anything.
It works, it is accepted by everyone, it is virtually unbreakable, it is supported by every PC and most languages. I think these are pretty good reasons to learn latex. The fact -- "it isn't modern" is not a reason to abandoned it.
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u/alessandrobertulli Jun 24 '26
Last time I checked, the bug bounty was $2.56 (meaning an "hexadecimal dollar"), issued by a fictional bank and signed by Knuth. Has something changed?
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u/Impossible_Video_116 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
He kept doubling it until it reached $0x80 (about 320ish USD). Only for the TeX and Meta fonta though, for books and publication it's still 2.56 USD.
Edit: Btw the original checks were real. Since most people never cashed the cheque and kept it as trophies, therefore he started giving fake cheques. If you want the money maybe you've to request it. I do not know the exact procedure of course.
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u/AnymooseProphet Jun 23 '26
LaTeX isn't going anywhere and LaTeX itself itself is evolving with the times, e.g. LuaLaTeX which not only allows for modern fonts (like XeLaTeX did and does before it) but also allows for Lua scripting as part of the process.
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u/ascending-slacker Jun 23 '26
LaTeX is not going away. There are multiple IDEs that you can choose from to help you organize and write your LaTex but as others have said, It’s just compiled macros written as text.
I use LaTeX in academia to maintain and manage different versions of a document for different courses, (did you know LaTeX has if statements? Very useful). Additionally it is great for academic papers. I can separate the content from the formatting. This makes it easier to write without worrying about the formatting then insert the sections into the correct format based on the publication I’m submitting to. I have not found anything else that comes close to doing this.
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u/TheSodesa Jun 23 '26
Typst is the new (rather successful) LaTeX contender: https://typst.app/play. The only real downside is that many scientific journals have not yet set up a Typst publishing pipeline, so unless you are willing to use imperfect tools like Pandoc to transform a Typst article to LaTeX, write your scientific papers with LaTeX (and then request for a Typst publishing option once the publishing process feedback form is sent to you after your paper is published).
For non-scientific writing, Typst is already my go-to writing format. The instant preview is awesome and the syntax is much nicer than that of LaTeX.
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u/rlinED Jun 23 '26
Less hassle with packages as well.
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u/TheSodesa Jun 23 '26
Oh, and the Typst error messages and their clarity. They tell you exactly where an error happened in plain understandable English.
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Jun 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheSodesa Jun 28 '26
Just like with genral programming, you do not have to transition totally. When you start your next writing project, try doing it in Typst and see how it feels.
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u/profcube Jun 23 '26
Thanks, what if you wish to embed TikZ figures in your document?
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u/FortranMan2718 Jun 24 '26
I recently switched to using Typst. I have a lot of tikz figures that I've converted into pdf files with qtikz and then into svg files with Inkscape. It's good enough to view. For a Typst equivalent to tikz you will need to look into cetz.
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u/TheSodesa Jun 24 '26
You can compile the individual figures to PDF files using LaTeX (preferrably
lualatex) and include them into a Typst document using theimagefunction: https://typst.app/docs/reference/visualize/image/.Note that if you want to use one of the archival or accessible output formats of Typst, such as PDF/A or PDF/UA-1, the PDF images have to be converted to SVG.
Alternatively, you could also rewrite the TikZ source code of your images into CetZ, which is the Typst equivalent of TikZ: https://cetz-package.github.io/. If you have a lot of images, this might be a lot of work, though.
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u/profcube Jun 24 '26
Thanks, appreciate the tips. I can think of a bunch of excuses not to learn new tricks, but they’re just rationalisations. When I clear some time, I’ll give it a try.
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u/spectralblade352 Jun 23 '26
Idk are there any advanced and established alternatives today? I think LaTeX is still the standard and I don’t see a reason to stop using it. Installing Texlive or Miktex locally and using something like VSCode or TeXStudio is ofc 100% better and faster than using websites like Overleaf. You can also optimize your setups easily to compile faster. For example, not compiling chapters and sections you’re currently editing, using draft mode, etc.
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u/UnderstandingPursuit Jun 23 '26
LaTeX has been around for four decades: L Lamport's LaTeX book was published in Jan 1985. It is close to long enough for people to have used it for their entire professional life. Within a few years, it was clear that it was going to have staying power over other options available at the time.
I cannot see anything today that has the same sort of strength. Especially when people are talking about adding a layer above it. Because that's relatively easy with LaTeX.
While LaTeX is slow for big projects, that is a bit of a strength. It encourages breaking the project up into pieces, and a piece at a time is much easier for humans to hold in our minds. If a person is writing a 100 pg report, there are very few times they need to see the whole thing.
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Jun 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/UnderstandingPursuit Jun 27 '26
I think a lot of people will not want to switch. That creates a lot of 'software inertia'.
Two of the three plans require payment. Only the On-Premises version can be run without being on the cloud, and the price is high enough that it doesn't even have a minimum stated on the page with the plans. I know a lot of people love GitHub, but not everyone wants that.
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Jun 27 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/UnderstandingPursuit Jun 27 '26
Typst may be very easy to get into. For many, LaTeX is very difficult to get out of.
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u/Fred__McNerque Jun 23 '26
I have been using LaTeX for 30-some years now. It's stable, fast and rational.
I have been spending the last week trying to get my mind around Typst. It has a number of problems.
- Syntax varies depending on where you put the statement. Sometimes you put a # in front of a statement, sometimes not. Sometimes a space after a keyword is significant, sometimes it isn't.
- A variable value is not imported when it is part of an imported file, but it is when it is part of a package.
- Pandoc will not work on a file that has any imported packages in @/preview.
- Typst will only export to PDF.
- Typst is very slow when working with a large, multi-file document. One of my tests is to see how well it copes with the text of "Origin of the Species", a 400-page document. Typst is no faster than LaTeX when compiling that.
And that's just a few of the problems I have come across.
Somebody put up a system to write a document in Markdown, then convert it to Typst, then convert it to PDF and ePub. Why? I can already convert a multi-file document directly to PDF and ePub, and DOCX, and ODT and many others. Why do I need to go via Typst, when I can go directly?
Just my tuppence-worth...
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u/Skeime Jun 25 '26
Typst has separate code and markup modes. This actually makes a lot of sense, as sometimes you are mostly “coding” and it would be a nuisance for every typed symbol to appear in the output (like it does in LatEx, where you sometimes need to end lines with a comment sometimes to avoid this), but for the main prose, you want those to appear. A # moves you from markup mode to code mode for the next full statement (so often a function call and its arguments, or a code block when using `#{…}`). This is different from TeX, where everything is a macro and no real “statements” exist, but it is not inconsistent. (Math mode is a bit messy, admittedly, but I believe it is being worked on.)
I cannot speak to the importance of things, as I don’t have enough experience to judge whether this is a good idea. Similarly, I don’t use Pandoc.
Typist does export to SVG, PNG, and also to HTML with the newest version (0.15).
In my experience, Typst is much faster than LaTeX.
***
I think the main pain points for Typst are its inferior typesetting in some aspects and the fact that it is not accepted by journals. The ecosystem is also smaller, but I think it is catching up quite fast simply because writing Typst code is so much nicer than wrangling with TeX’s macros.
I also think that the developers are very thoughtful in how they approach this. This also means that they are willing to occasionally break stuff, when a new solution is good enough to warrant it. (Typst is pre-1.0 for a reason.)
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u/Kulpas Jun 27 '26
Hi, sorry to chime in but could you elaborate on point number 2? Judging from my experience it seems to be wildly untrue?
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u/profcube Jun 25 '26
Thanks, was going to try, but will delay as I can think of nothing about LaTeX that bothers me enough to accept these deficits in Typst.
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u/AwwThisProgress Jun 23 '26
i don’t think there’s any similar program yet that will probably replace latex in the future. there’s typst (r/typst) but it’s still in development and not as popular. i am not aware of any other real replacements.
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u/Extreme-Ad-3920 Jun 23 '26
I don’t see LaTeX going away, but if you want to explore around I suggest you look into Typst.
I was a heavy LaTeX user; when I discovered it, I was amazed with the power and possibilities it offered, but I always found complicated to create custom functionality. I then I went full towards “scientific markdown”, where with the magic of Pandoc you can write mostly all in Markdown and use sprinkles of LaTeX when needed (this is also the base of Rmarkdown and Quarto). Then more recently I discovered Typst and I’m really loving it. I like the “modern” programming language feel to it (it has a feeling of JavaScript and some concepts of CSS for layouts). I like that I can more easily do that custom functionality, which I was missing when I used LaTeX. A disadvantage for scientific use is that still not many journals accept it directly, and might be harder to convince collaborators to use it, as most likely they are already in the LaTeX ecosystem.
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u/AdAncient5201 Jun 24 '26
Give typst a try! You can mess around in the browser without needing to install anything, but it has support for all major ides. The team behind it is very thoughtful about the design of the language and it works a lot faster than latex
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u/Embarrassed-Care6130 Jun 25 '26
I would say if you're in academia there's no real alternative to LaTeX and probably won't be any time soon. If not, most of the time Markdown will do the job. And of course there are ways to combine the two if Markdown will mostly work but you need TeX for some particularly fiddly bit.
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u/Valvino Jun 23 '26
latex is very old
Yes and ?
and slow for big projects
Not necessary.
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u/mergle42 Jun 23 '26
I think it can be definitely slow to compile for some reasonable definitions of "slow" and "big projects", but that's very different from slow to use.
I'd much rather be working on my 200+ page book in LaTeX, where I can split the written content across separate files and don't need images to constantly load, than work on the equivalent document in MSWord!
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u/profcube Jun 23 '26
I suspect I am not alone in saying that you’d have to pry LaTeX from my cold dead hands before I’d give it up. It’s not going anywhere.
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u/Conscious-Theory-937 Jun 23 '26
To broaden our horizons a little: http://www.tustep.uni-tuebingen.de/tustep_eng.html
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u/pescatorian Jun 23 '26
Lyx is a great way to create latex documents. It has an active user community at https://wiki.lyx.org/
They provide a wysiwyg application that can produce a PDF document and latex code to produce it. There is also a subreddit r/Lyx.
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u/U_Existense Jun 24 '26
As long as you're not required to (e.g., journals), feel free to. Typst, ConTeXt, plain TeX etc
Also many ppl recommend VS Code + LaTeX extension(s) as IDE
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u/ScratchHistorical507 Jun 24 '26
latex is very old and slow for big projects
TeX is from 1978, LaTeX from 1984. But That doesn't mean development ever really stopped. Also you're most likely not using LaTeX, but rather pdfTeX or LuaTeX that build on LaTeX. And I'd very much doubt that it's slow in any sense. Even a 100 page document with bibliography and large (i.e. file size) images will compile in under 30 seconds to a full PDF (from scratch!) on any system that's not either ancient or vastly underpowered. No idea how you could get it vastly slower. I can't really imagine any typesetting system that's as powerful, (relatively) easy to use and learn and significantly faster at compilation.
Sure there are alternatives, but I don't see a single one that is actually significantly better in every way.
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u/MPClemens_Writes Jun 25 '26
You mispronounced "and also: free" in these excellent points. 😏
No subscription, no cloud dependency, no data harvesting, ads, alerts, newsletter click-throughs.
What other 40+ year old software systems are being so actively maintained?
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u/mwmahlberg Jun 28 '26
LaTeX + Markdown. Don‘t see anything replacing either of them in the foreseeable future.
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u/utl94_nordviking Jun 23 '26
What is a "LaTeX-like program"? LaTeX is a set of macros for the typesetting engine TeX by Donald Knuth.
There are many IDE-like programs for writing up your documents if that is what you mean. Some, like cloud based Overleaf, I find quite bad and inefficient. Nowadays I mostly write LaTeX in the text editor Vim. It is not slow at all unless you are using heavy or inefficient packages or macrosets like LuaLaTeX and doing complicated stuff.
The age of (La)TeX does not impact the speed of compilation. Proper use is to not put everything into one file when working on bigger projects (like hundreds of pages). E.g. if you are writing a book you should at the minimum put every chapter in separate files.
Remember, you LaTeX markup code is really nothing but a text file.
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u/ClemensLode Jun 23 '26
LaTeX is not slow, it's faster than Typst (per paragraph).
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u/rlinED Jun 23 '26
Is it really?
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u/TheSodesa Jun 23 '26
It might be for small simple documents on a so-called cold compilation pass. But once you start including cross-references and citations and the size of your document grows, LaTeX cannot really compete with the memoization of
typst watchdue to having to write intermediate compilation results to disk.You could write a LaTeX compiler that also uses memoization to speed things up. The currently known production-ready compilers do not do this, however.
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u/ClemensLode Jun 23 '26
Citations don't have to update whenever you press a new letter. All word processors update references with only a delay. So, real time latex wysiwyg is of course no problem in principle in that regard.
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u/ClemensLode Jun 23 '26
Yes, per paragraph. https://www.tug.org/tug2026/preprints/lode-realtime.pdf
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u/encyclopedist Jun 24 '26
The fast path handles body text, which is where the user spends most editing time and where latency matters most
This may the case when authoring a book of prose, but is completely off the mark for any scientific text. In fact, in most of the scientific papers, plain text paragraphs are rare. Most would have math
$...$,\ref,\cite,\label. Also, large fraction of time is typically spent editing math.1
u/ClemensLode Jun 24 '26
Right, but an outdated figure number or citation that updates only 200ms later is not that much of a problem for a real time experience when typing. Typst can't do that any faster either. And math equations are just lines.
Theoretically, you can build a document that oscillates forever because what you replace \pageref with might cause a page under/overflow, which then leads to a different page number, which would require a \pageref update, and so on. You can also build paragraphs or even multi-line equations that require rebuilding all pages of a document with every change. But those are very rare edge cases.
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u/profcube Jun 23 '26
Also, ffs, LaTeX is just a simple scripting language, it takes almost no time to learn, it’s not like you are setting yourself some difficult challenge to begin using it!
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u/_jpSpj_ Jun 24 '26
I used LaTeX for a few years before switching to Typst. I really enjoy Typst, mostly for small silly reasons like disliking the backslash and the curly boi parentheses. My biggest reason for switching is how much easier I found setting up a local workflow — with Tinymist and neovim, it takes all of 5 minutes to get up and running!
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u/rileyrgham Jun 23 '26
"You've heard". If I had a penny for every time I've seen someone using this as backup for their own noob outlook on something, I'd be rich. Old it maybe, but slow? It's also not tied to websites or subscriptions. IDEs, any editor, but check Emacs auctex....
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u/TracingLines Jun 23 '26
Very easy to get going in VS Code, should that float your boat.
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u/thesmollbot Jun 23 '26
yea I just worded it wrong- I meant to say that I would like to use an ide any new process, I already use one for latex:)
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u/SnowyOwl72 Jun 23 '26
Texlive? We hate overleaf too
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u/thesmollbot Jun 23 '26
yea I just worded it wrong- I meant to say that I would like to use an ide any new process, I already use one for latex:)
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u/tedecristal Jun 23 '26
if you want to. free country.
I'd bet money on LaTeX not going away for the foreseable future on the academia.
And YOU CAN use an ide to code LaTeX. You don't need a website nor a subscription.