The getting started of myst.tools does not "get one started"

[jgalazm]

Hi there.

I am new to this project, and I am very excited to use it, however, when I tried to follow the guide at https://myst.tools, after the "getting-started" I got stuck after the installation and did not know what to do.

I see the guide continues to the "myst syntax overview", but I think that a "hello world" example with the main features and boilerplate would be helpful to connect the dots. My experience is that I keep reading about all these awesome features but I can not do them myself.

In particular, I would like to write a scientific article in markdown and build a pdf from it, get a Tex source that I can send to a journal, maybe build it as a website too, etc. It is not clear for me if I should use a .yml frontmatter or just the .md header, and the vscode extension did not make a difference when previewing the .md files.

Do you know of simple examples that achieve these features? Do you think some of these could be put in the "getting started"?

Thanks a lot for the project though, its features sound really interesting.

[rowanc1]

Hi @jgalazm -- thanks for the note, @choldgraf and I were meeting this morning to aim to improve the site documentation (it is still a relatively new project, and was previously part of the Curvenote CLI).

Probably the best docs we have for the tutorial walk through are still in Curvenote (see here for a full tutorial, replacing 'curvenote' with 'myst' should mostly get you there). That one uses a blog as the content. For a phd thesis see here (source). For a paper see here (source).

Hope that helps -- please feel free to open issues directly here: https://github.com/executablebooks/mystjs/issues

Fixing issues on the onboarding process is top priority for us -- so we will respond fast!

[jgalazm]

Alright, I will try the tutorial and examples, thanks again!

[rowanc1]

Hi @jgalazm -- I am running a webinar next Wednesday on getting started with mystjs for writing scientific papers, and using that as a deadline on myself to improve the docs. :) Would love to see you there! More on that here.

[rowanc1]

Hi again @jgalazm -- we have put a bunch of effort over the last month into improving the first experience with myst-tools.org, especially the documents quickstart. Let us know if this is starting to meet the mark, would love any other feedback of where to improve!

https://myst-tools.org/docs/mystjs/quickstart-myst-documents

[jgalazm]

Hi @rowanc1, thanks a lot, the guide is super clear and it definitely gives a good first experience.

Talking from my experience, as more of a latex user than a markdown user, what pulls me back from fully adopting myst in my workflow is the "synctex" feature that most latex editors have. From this getting started I get that, maybe, the experience is more of a frontend developer where you manually jump from code to live rendering of the app, focusing on one feature at a time. As a researcher, instead, I would like to be able to automatically/easily jump from a markdown line or equation to the rendered document and vice versa. This makes the writing much easier and productive than just guessing or re-reading the document in rendered or source code format. This is the "synctex" feature which you can find for example in the vscode "Latex Workshop" extension. On my case cmd+click on the pdf preview puts the cursor in the corresponding line in the editor and pressing cmd+option+J from the editor scrolls the preview to the corresponding line and highlights it for a short time.

Do you guys have or plan on having such a feature in myst? I think that if you could add it to the getting started guides it would be a great addition for latex users like me.