If you’re reading this in a browser, you’ll have noticed that the site’s design has been simplified. My original design was based off some AI-rendered test blog I was playing with long ago. I’d changed it to be more tumblr-esque. While staring at the home page this morning, I noticed that it practically hurt my eyes looking at it. So busy! I dropped back to a variation on the original. It’s calmer now. I can add some flare back later if I get bored.
The way LaTeX typesets documents is so much better than everything else that it forced me through its difficult and never-ending learning curve years ago. Eventually, I ended up with scripts and templates and workflows that work for me.
For grins, I wanted to see if the tiny and already-installed groff could replace it. Short answer: it cannot. However, while farting around I ran into Typst again. I’ve successfully ignored Typst because using it would feel like cheating on LaTeX. But curiosity got the best of me.
Typst markup is supported in pandoc, which means going from .org or .md to a nicely-typeset PDF is possible. It turned out that not only is it possible, but it’s easy. And very fast. Oh, and it’s not a 1.5GB download like the LaTeX suite. The verdict will be out until I’ve had a chance to do some side-by-side comparisons of the output, but it’s promising.