Yes, I do still plan on updating this website, I’ve just been very busy—it turns out that college is a lot of work, and I’ve been enjoying a month off before I start a research internship in June. Sorry if anyone reads this blog regularly and was enjoying my shenanigans.

In any case, since I haven’t updated this blog in a hot minute, let me talk about Typst:

Typst is a document typsetting software that’s currently batting to replace LaTeX. Now, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with LaTeX, because while the program is indeed powerful, it’s absolutely archaic—but I don’t think that typst is a good replacement.

I don’t know why typst feels the need to work with its own markup language—they easily could have implemented, say, pandoc’s markdown and called it a day. Markdown is used virtually everywhere on the internet—it’s used in the majority of README files, loads of static site generators, and even fucking tumblr. It’s not like markdown would be incompatible with their (rather nifty) scripting features—it would be fine. The main thing that gets me is that it uses underscores for italics instead of either underscores or asterisks—it’s way easier to reach the asterisk with your hand then it is the underscore, so I think that Typst could eventually be a source of repetitive strain injury for some people.

Oh yeah, and also having little reddit avatars on the homepage does not make me want to use the program more—when I see redditors, it makes me want to stay as far away as humanly fucking possible.