It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
If you're curious about how to build TeX from scratch, have a look at my TeX.SE answer:
> It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
I don't know what constitutes "sane", but I literally just downloaded and installed it right now because you mentioned it, and it choked on a trivial hello world:
$ mtxrunjit --script context doc.tex
...
> tex error on line 1 in file doc.tex: ! Undefined control sequence
...
1 >> \documentclass{article}
2 \begin{document}Hello, world\end{document}
...which might explain why it goes unmentioned?
I feel like this is gonna be a tougher sell than you expect. How the heck is a user expected to switch to ConTeXt?
I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book.
The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.
BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.
> it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour ...
I thought that the combination of the Pascal and Java versions[1] of TeX would be sufficient guidance to produce another language/implementation.
> is a huge cost for very little benefit
A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).
I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3[1][2]. Also, it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic[3][4] (which looks like a dead project itself) out of the box.
Seems like an admirable project but they’re building on creaky foundations. Even the way TexLive is released feels like something from academia than a real piece of software.
I work on the packaging in TeX Live, and I'll freely admit that it's arcane and convoluted (from a packager's perspective), but it's super reliable, and the end-users are mostly insulated from all the inner workings. It can indeed be tricky to debug if something breaks, but this is thankfully quite rare.
Sometimes bugs appear only if you load three specific packages in a specific order. The fact that there are no namespaces and every package can modify everything makes it a complete nightmare. LaTeX would do well to take a hint from the lessons we learned in the past 40 years. Or just retire it and push something sane forward, like Typst.
I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.
I’ve written book-length documents in Plain TeX (probably what you mean — nobody writes in “raw” tex) and in LaTeX. I would say that Typst, if it’s a replacement for anything, is a replacement for LuaLaTeX, because of its programmability. But in this article I framed it as a possible LaTeX replacement:
Congrats to all the TeXLive team on a new release.
If you're stuck on something LaTeX related, remember there's the latest edition to The LaTex Companion. It even has an appendix explaining the (in)famously cryptic LaTeX/TeX error messages:
Here's the list of notable changes in TeX Live 2026 [0]. LaTeX is released independently from TeX Live, so looking through its changelog [1] is also helpful if you haven't updated recently.
I recently had good luck writing a paper in org-mode. The .tex export has been around forever but I never really played with it - unlike other Emacs users, I don't actually use org-mode that much.
But in the end, it worked surprisingly well. Mind you, I didn't have anything too fancy in the paper (no figures, minipages, tikz, etc...), so that made the task very easy. But it was a good workflow:
- Write org-mode text in left buffer.
- Have Emacs issue a .tex export on save.
- Have the document automatically compile when .tex files are newer than the .pdf file
- Have the right buffer show and automatically reload the pdf file.
That made it so I could just write stuff in the left buffer and on save, the pdf in the right buffer would update and reflect the last changes. I found that a quite pleasant setup.
After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is open enough to try WYSWYG.
To save people’s time: this thing is not LaTeX and you won’t be able to use any of the LaTeX packages that you need if you are preparing a manuscript for a journal (for example).
Worth noting that LLMs are very bad at writing cetz code, even if you try to feed them all the docs. I had to use TiKZ and import the resulting PDFs for some of the more complex illustrations in my thesis.
I've also started using typst for some projects.
I am slowly getting used to the syntax. But it's a process for me.
I also still have latex projects/docs
I've recently made a dozen vastly different projects with Typst, ALL of which would have created dependency hell, syntax noise, and hours of extra pointless work in Latex. It's such a clear win at this point it's embarrassing.
I mean, LyX has met my needs since 2019 - I don't particularly need to be optimistic about it. I was even able to bring in parts of my old LaTeX preamble with me, especially some utility macros. It was a pretty painless switch with immediate benefit.
(I've done everything in it from write honors theses and format CVs.)
I've been interested in Typst. But beyond report generation (which I avoid in general), I don't really have a general "document processing" tool, but multiple specialized ones, and given Typst's current jack of all trades/master of none status, I'm not sure what it'll replace. I use Quarto for a lot of my statistical computing, LyX if I need to do a lot of finicky math typesetting (e.g. if I need to break out \qquad), and Word - god forbid - for my non-technical collaborators.
After delivering my thesis in LaTeX, I never bothered with it again, even at CERN back in 2003 most folks were using a mixture of Word and FrameMaker, with templates to have a TeX like paper output.
- The LaTeX tagging project [0] is definitely the biggest ongoing project, and they've been making really good progress lately [1] [2].
- ar5iv [3] is somewhat outside the TeX world, but I find it pretty interesting since it's able to successfully convert most articles to HTML. Usually conversion tools have either required perfect markup or manual fixes, but ar5iv is completely automatic, and it even works with the horrible programming practices that most document authors use.
- I'm personally a big fan of ConTeXt [4], a lesser-known TeX format. ConTeXt itself isn't new, but it tends to gain new features quicker than the other formats; some recent new features include improved math typesetting [5] and improved paragraph breaking [6] [7].
- The LaTeX Team just published "latex-cmds" [8] a few weeks ago, which is a handy reference to all the recently-introduced macros (and some older ones too).
If you’re installing this on a fresh machine, the network installer is usually the smoother option. The full ISO is great if you’re setting up multiple systems or need an offline install, but for most people the net install saves some headaches.
One thing I like about a full install of TeX Live is it comes with a large number of amazing manuals in PDF form; perfect for reading when bored on the plane without Internet access.
Look for /texmf-dist/doc/fonts/memdesign/memdesign.pdf if you want a fun non-technical one.
I found out the other day that llama.cpp can work with PDF images offline without Internet connection. Combine with local Rustdoc and TeXLive, playing with plan TeX becomes fun again.
This comment section has made it clear to me (and maybe others that use some of these tools every 10 years) that just finding the correct project/binary if you want to use TeX can be... interesting :)
SwiftLatex, TexLyre and StellarLatex seem to be exactly this. Apparently this is something a lot of people want to see in the world, awesome stuff. I wonder what's the performance like between native XeLaTex and these wasm version and if it will be Overleaf's demise if these solutions can be easily self-hosted by organizations without worrying about the server getting bogged down by compile jobs.
Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent.
The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, followed by an era of resting on one's laurels while creating very little, mostly just stuff built on top of existing systems in an attempt to simplify things, which only resulted in making them more complex and fragile, with zero innovation.
Today, we have generations of developers who simply don't know classic FLOSS tools beyond the surface level and lack the technical background to create new ones that aren't dependent on the tech giants. This is because obsolete universities have de facto trained legions of big tech labourers rather than autonomous technicians capable of standing on their own two feet.
The issue is that there was never a real desire to give "the power of computing" to end users. Consequently, at the first opportunity, the desktop was undermined and rejected to keep everyone dependent on someone else's services. Now, young developers don't know how to evolve back towards the desktop, even though they sense, without fully understanding, that this is the right way forward.
We are losing decades of potential evolution with repercussions for centuries to come, just to feed a handful of people who profit from others' ignorance.
So, while it's true that on one hand we have excellent tools that are obsolete, clunky, and difficult to integrate today, it's also true that on the other hand we have a void. This is because the foundations of modern software are flawed and unsustainable, created solely for the interests of Big Tech. Either we move past this or we head for ruin, as has been happening for some time now; eventually, it will be impossible to carry on and we'll have to start again from scratch, with enormous costs, delays, and damage.
You can still install old versions going back to the 90s [0]. If you specifically want to update/install a package on a current installation of TeX Live 2025, you just need to run
tlmgr repository set https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2025/tlnet-final
(You can replace that URL with any of the historic mirrors in [0])
ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads.
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/
It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
If you're curious about how to build TeX from scratch, have a look at my TeX.SE answer:
https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/576314/2148
I'd imagine making a FOSS port in Rust that has non-cryptic error messages wouldn't be a multi-year project using modern GPTs.
> ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads.
> It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do.
I don't know what constitutes "sane", but I literally just downloaded and installed it right now because you mentioned it, and it choked on a trivial hello world:
...which might explain why it goes unmentioned?I feel like this is gonna be a tougher sell than you expect. How the heck is a user expected to switch to ConTeXt?
You wrote a LaTeX document. ConTeXt does not claim to be compatible with LaTeX.
You can find a "hello world" here: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Document_layout_and_layers/Tu...
LaTeX is not ConTeXt.
Both use TeX as their layout engine. Both are different type of markup languages that live on top of TeX.
How did you install ConTeXt? Because "mtxrunjit" shouldn't be included in any modern versions.
I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book.
The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.
BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.
> it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour ...
I thought that the combination of the Pascal and Java versions[1] of TeX would be sufficient guidance to produce another language/implementation.
> is a huge cost for very little benefit
A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System
[2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/-/blob/main/LICENSE.t...
[3]: https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3[1][2]. Also, it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic[3][4] (which looks like a dead project itself) out of the box.
[1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/
[2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3
[3] http://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/
[4] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/
> I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3
It's either already here or never happening, depending on your perspective [0] [1].
> it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic
What do you mean by "automation"?
[0]: https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/11/the-mythical-latex3
[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb44-1/tb136mitt-history.pdf#page=5
Ever tried latexmk for the automation?
Seems like an admirable project but they’re building on creaky foundations. Even the way TexLive is released feels like something from academia than a real piece of software.
I work on the packaging in TeX Live, and I'll freely admit that it's arcane and convoluted (from a packager's perspective), but it's super reliable, and the end-users are mostly insulated from all the inner workings. It can indeed be tricky to debug if something breaks, but this is thankfully quite rare.
Yes, unlike real software it has backward compatibility to the 80s.
Things break all the damn time with LaTeX. Example: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/730126/update-to-cle...
Sometimes bugs appear only if you load three specific packages in a specific order. The fact that there are no namespaces and every package can modify everything makes it a complete nightmare. LaTeX would do well to take a hint from the lessons we learned in the past 40 years. Or just retire it and push something sane forward, like Typst.
Latex is not Tex.
Neither is texlive. Texlive and LaTeX is what this thread and the comment you replied to are about.
Typst is a replacement for TeX.
Not LaTeX.
You'd of course need to read the documentation on what TeX and LaTeX are to understand this. Most people would rather write a new system.
I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.
Have you written documents in raw TeX?
I’ve written book-length documents in Plain TeX (probably what you mean — nobody writes in “raw” tex) and in LaTeX. I would say that Typst, if it’s a replacement for anything, is a replacement for LuaLaTeX, because of its programmability. But in this article I framed it as a possible LaTeX replacement:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/
Congrats to all the TeXLive team on a new release.
If you're stuck on something LaTeX related, remember there's the latest edition to The LaTex Companion. It even has an appendix explaining the (in)famously cryptic LaTeX/TeX error messages:
https://latex-project.org/help/books/
There's also, among other resources, the great LaTeX Font Catalogue: https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/
Enjoy the new release!
Here's the list of notable changes in TeX Live 2026 [0]. LaTeX is released independently from TeX Live, so looking through its changelog [1] is also helpful if you haven't updated recently.
[0]: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-94...
[1]: https://www.latex-project.org/news/latex2e-news/ltnews.pdf#i...
Cool. I've moved on to typst and hope to never touch latex again in my lifetime...
I recently had good luck writing a paper in org-mode. The .tex export has been around forever but I never really played with it - unlike other Emacs users, I don't actually use org-mode that much.
But in the end, it worked surprisingly well. Mind you, I didn't have anything too fancy in the paper (no figures, minipages, tikz, etc...), so that made the task very easy. But it was a good workflow:
That made it so I could just write stuff in the left buffer and on save, the pdf in the right buffer would update and reflect the last changes. I found that a quite pleasant setup.With typst its fast enough to update the pdf/png/svg preview while you are typing, instead of waiting 0.x seconds when hitting save :)
Yeah, I know, it's pretty cool... because, frankly, who's got that much time to waste??
After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is open enough to try WYSWYG.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152982
To save people’s time: this thing is not LaTeX and you won’t be able to use any of the LaTeX packages that you need if you are preparing a manuscript for a journal (for example).
Typst lacks PGF/TikZ alternative.
https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz
Worth noting that LLMs are very bad at writing cetz code, even if you try to feed them all the docs. I had to use TiKZ and import the resulting PDFs for some of the more complex illustrations in my thesis.
Interesting, thanks. Looks quite promising.
Stared typst ages ago. Thanks for the reminder to try it out. Now the cost of switching is so low too
I've also started using typst for some projects. I am slowly getting used to the syntax. But it's a process for me. I also still have latex projects/docs
So happy to see new texlive as well
Switched about 3 Years ago, never looked back. Its a happy place.
I've recently made a dozen vastly different projects with Typst, ALL of which would have created dependency hell, syntax noise, and hours of extra pointless work in Latex. It's such a clear win at this point it's embarrassing.
reminds me of when LyX became trendy with a small group of optimists.
LyX is cool but it was still just on top of TeX. typst is much more fundamental.
I mean, LyX has met my needs since 2019 - I don't particularly need to be optimistic about it. I was even able to bring in parts of my old LaTeX preamble with me, especially some utility macros. It was a pretty painless switch with immediate benefit.
(I've done everything in it from write honors theses and format CVs.)
I've been interested in Typst. But beyond report generation (which I avoid in general), I don't really have a general "document processing" tool, but multiple specialized ones, and given Typst's current jack of all trades/master of none status, I'm not sure what it'll replace. I use Quarto for a lot of my statistical computing, LyX if I need to do a lot of finicky math typesetting (e.g. if I need to break out \qquad), and Word - god forbid - for my non-technical collaborators.
LyX is pretty great. It has an equation editor that actually works very well - once you learn it it's much nicer than typing in the raw LaTeX.
If I had to use LaTeX, I'd definitely do it via LyX.
After delivering my thesis in LaTeX, I never bothered with it again, even at CERN back in 2003 most folks were using a mixture of Word and FrameMaker, with templates to have a TeX like paper output.
I'm one of the developers working on TeX Live; I'll try answer any questions in the replies.
What's the most exciting thing going on in TeX right now?
- The LaTeX tagging project [0] is definitely the biggest ongoing project, and they've been making really good progress lately [1] [2].
- ar5iv [3] is somewhat outside the TeX world, but I find it pretty interesting since it's able to successfully convert most articles to HTML. Usually conversion tools have either required perfect markup or manual fixes, but ar5iv is completely automatic, and it even works with the horrible programming practices that most document authors use.
- I'm personally a big fan of ConTeXt [4], a lesser-known TeX format. ConTeXt itself isn't new, but it tends to gain new features quicker than the other formats; some recent new features include improved math typesetting [5] and improved paragraph breaking [6] [7].
- The LaTeX Team just published "latex-cmds" [8] a few weeks ago, which is a handy reference to all the recently-introduced macros (and some older ones too).
[0]: https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/tagging-status/
[1]: https://pdfa.org/accessible-math-in-pdf-finally/
[2]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb46-2/tb143fischer-tagging25.pdf
[3]: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/
[4]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
[5]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-2/tb134hagen-math.pdf
[6]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb46-1/tb142hagen-paragraphs.pdf
[7]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb45-3/tb141hagen-twins.pdf
[8]: https://texdoc.org/serve/latex-cmds/0
If you’re installing this on a fresh machine, the network installer is usually the smoother option. The full ISO is great if you’re setting up multiple systems or need an offline install, but for most people the net install saves some headaches.
The last time I did this I used the isolandoftex docker image and set it up with DevContainers in vscode https://eccentric.dk/2025/08/25/using-texlive-with-dev-conta...
One thing I like about a full install of TeX Live is it comes with a large number of amazing manuals in PDF form; perfect for reading when bored on the plane without Internet access.
Look for /texmf-dist/doc/fonts/memdesign/memdesign.pdf if you want a fun non-technical one.
I found out the other day that llama.cpp can work with PDF images offline without Internet connection. Combine with local Rustdoc and TeXLive, playing with plan TeX becomes fun again.
https://ontouchstart.github.io/rabbit-holes/tex_rabbit_hole_...
This comment section has made it clear to me (and maybe others that use some of these tools every 10 years) that just finding the correct project/binary if you want to use TeX can be... interesting :)
https://www.tug.org/levels.html seems like a good start
A WASM version of (La)TeX plus a decent IDE would be amazing. I'm wondering if such a thing exists.
SwiftLatex, TexLyre and StellarLatex seem to be exactly this. Apparently this is something a lot of people want to see in the world, awesome stuff. I wonder what's the performance like between native XeLaTex and these wasm version and if it will be Overleaf's demise if these solutions can be easily self-hosted by organizations without worrying about the server getting bogged down by compile jobs.
https://www.swiftlatex.com/
https://arxtect.github.io/StellarLatexLanding
https://texlyre.github.io/
Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent.
The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, followed by an era of resting on one's laurels while creating very little, mostly just stuff built on top of existing systems in an attempt to simplify things, which only resulted in making them more complex and fragile, with zero innovation.
Today, we have generations of developers who simply don't know classic FLOSS tools beyond the surface level and lack the technical background to create new ones that aren't dependent on the tech giants. This is because obsolete universities have de facto trained legions of big tech labourers rather than autonomous technicians capable of standing on their own two feet.
The issue is that there was never a real desire to give "the power of computing" to end users. Consequently, at the first opportunity, the desktop was undermined and rejected to keep everyone dependent on someone else's services. Now, young developers don't know how to evolve back towards the desktop, even though they sense, without fully understanding, that this is the right way forward.
We are losing decades of potential evolution with repercussions for centuries to come, just to feed a handful of people who profit from others' ignorance.
So, while it's true that on one hand we have excellent tools that are obsolete, clunky, and difficult to integrate today, it's also true that on the other hand we have a void. This is because the foundations of modern software are flawed and unsustainable, created solely for the interests of Big Tech. Either we move past this or we head for ruin, as has been happening for some time now; eventually, it will be impossible to carry on and we'll have to start again from scratch, with enormous costs, delays, and damage.
Great! All my projects will now break because it instantly becomes impossible to download from the previous version.
You can still install old versions going back to the 90s [0]. If you specifically want to update/install a package on a current installation of TeX Live 2025, you just need to run
(You can replace that URL with any of the historic mirrors in [0])[0]: https://tug.org/historic/
latex error messages are basically indecipherable to me which makes it unusable for anything
[dead]
For technical reporting, I recently started using html and print media css.
The system is flexible and simple.
Used TeX for the same and had to lose sanity for it to even work semi well.