Typst is a system for typesetting documents into various formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, and, in progre [...]

132 points•leephillips•5 days ago•33 comments•

33 comments

commandersaki5 days ago
I write this in pretty much every Typst thread. Here are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX and some recent additions:

1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.

2. Compiling is instant.

3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).

4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.

5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. [I've been informed this is actually incorrect and Latex does allow you to specify macros anywhere]

6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.

8. Compiling with Typst is always one pass.

9. I'm not sure how this would compare with Latex but I'm in law school and needed to cite using AGLC4 which has a CSL (citationstyles.org) template supported by Typst; I have confirmed the CSL XML is correct but doesn't render properly in Typst. The workaround I found was to hand typeset my own citation and bibliography which sucks.

10. Most of what you need is built in to Typst and I've yet to need to import a package or template; even for the most basic documents with Latex you find you'll need to use many packages (such as fancyhdr for customised headers and footers).

11. Latex distributions can be a monstrosity, gigabytes in size like TexLive, and I acknowledge you can get slimmed down on-demand version such as Miktex. There's just one distribution of Typst and its pretty lean, although it might be nice to have multiple implementations in the future.

12. Latex markup looks like an eye-sore, typst reads more naturally as plain-text with a bit of a markdown flavour.

13. Although I loathe discord, I find getting real time support so easy with an almost real time answer to any question I have and the community is heaps friendly; getting support with Latex is not so easy.

7bit4 days ago
I wrote my first paper (nothing to publich, just for university) ever and went from typst to latest last minute because I got scared and went with the template of a studi-colleague. I heard latex was bad, but it's much worse than I could have ever anticipated.

I took the time off uni to migrate back to typst because I refuse to submit to the psychological warfare that is latex ever again.

hedgehog5 days ago
Typst has a bunch of nice features, it seems like I discover another every time I use it for something. Most recently I saw that you can import TOML (or JSON if you really want) data into the template, making it really simple to populate the content from another tool.
sudorm-rf--no-p5 days ago
Yeah, quite useful for generating pdfs for invoices from json
PaoloBarbolini5 days ago
And unlike browser-based solutions, Typst can produce PDF/A, it can embed files into the PDF and it can produce charts and QR Codes on it's own without having to rely on an external solution.
film425 days ago
I use typst for all sorts of things in customer apps: conference badges, customer invoices, social media asset generation (like thumbnails for podcasts, customer reviews, etc.), certificates of completion, progress reports, and much more. It's just so robust, efficient and works everywhere. Never again do I need to worry about html formatting to make PDFs.
selfhoster13125 days ago
As someone who makes a professional use of typst, i'm curious how you support the project financially? It seems like they have a Github Sponsors setup, but their only commercial offering is for the web editor which IMO brings little value.

I was looking for a way to donate them a little cash the other day because i found typst super useful for my non-profit activities (and super easy to teach), but i didn't find one.

commandersaki5 days ago
They say that the subscription to their web application is a good way to fund them. Unfortunately they don't do bounties because I would like to focus money into HTML export support.
ethin5 days ago
I love typst. It's about time we have an authoring system like it that also let's you publish HTML versions of things you write with it instead of just PDFs. Papers in Academia for the longest time have been PDFs, which screen readers are terrible with, mainly because the PDF format is an abomination, and makes accessibility (let alone interoperability) unnecessarily painful.
leephillips5 days ago
PDF serves an important purpose; it’s not an abomination. It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended. HTML can not do this. It can serve as a reliable archive and be made (imperfectly) accessible, as described in the article. Of course all this comes with significant tradeoffs, including reduced interoperability, as you say. But there are good reasons for academic publishing, especially in math, CS, and physics (but also in some areas of the humanities) to prefer PDFs—it’s not just obstinacy.
eviks5 days ago
> It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended.

How many authors intended to break copy and paste of their data?

ethin5 days ago
I mean, I know why the format is used and what it does. That doesn't make any less of an abomination. Parsing it is an absolute clusterfuck, and accessibility for it is horrifically bad even in Acrobat. By contrast, something like HTML is far better, even if it doesn't necessarily display the document exactly the same way all the time on all devices.
andonvr5 days ago
I was able to use Typst for my thesis, it felt sooo smooth. Turned it into a conference paper half a year later, and had to use the IEEE Latex format to hand it in. Oof, that was humbling.
MaxBarraclough5 days ago
As someone who hasn't used Typst, how manual was the conversion process?
leephillips5 days ago
Not the person you’re asking, but I’ll just mention that pandoc has a Typst reader. I use a pandoc filter to write in markdown with math in Typst and convert to LaTeX:

https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/

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