[HN Gopher] Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
        
       Author : vogu66
       Score  : 404 points
       Date   : 2024-07-20 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | sprinkly-dust wrote:
       | Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say
       | that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined,
       | engaging, and dare I say fun -- though that might just be me. The
       | functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the
       | erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and
       | sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode
       | brings all the features one could like.
       | 
       | In comparison to LaTeX, overall document typesetting is far more
       | straightforward. However, for long multi-page stretches of
       | equations solving, I feel that LaTeX is easier to type than Typst
       | because its syntax is not that of a functional programming
       | language but more akin to markdown. Thus, one does not need to
       | think as far in advance when typesetting equations with lots of
       | functions, superscript, and subscript.
        
         | crngefest wrote:
         | As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any
         | benefits to me over using markdown?
        
           | ksynwa wrote:
           | It depends on what you are doing with your markdown files.
           | For example, if you are using them as the source for a
           | statically generated website typst won't do much for you.
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | You have more control over the style and structure. If you
           | use markdown + css, that's a different story.
        
             | crngefest wrote:
             | Yea that is my setup right now.
             | 
             | I write markdown and use eleventy + nunjucks templates to
             | build the final result.
             | 
             | It's pretty easy to create new layouts and styles for
             | really any use case with that setup in minutes.
        
               | PartiallyTyped wrote:
               | If that's the case, I don't think you will get any
               | benefits by switching to Typst.
        
           | WolfOliver wrote:
           | With or without equations, just use MonsterWriter. It gives
           | you LaTeX results without needing to know what LaTeX is.
           | 
           | But, yes LaTeX has other benefits, e.g. citing references, or
           | creating PDFs according to layout and typesettings best
           | practices.
        
             | m_kos wrote:
             | MonsterWriter is your product, correct?
        
             | adwn wrote:
             | It is customary to add a short disclaimer when you're
             | promoting your own product or project.
        
             | WolfOliver wrote:
             | Yes it is my own product. Sorry for not pointing it out.
        
           | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
           | I would say probably not.
           | 
           | Markdown is really more about getting words down in plain
           | text with a very simple structure for rendering on the web.
           | 
           | Typst and LaTex make stark distinctions between composing and
           | typesetting. They are programmatic typesetting systems with
           | very structured and fine grained control over the look and
           | design of a document once it's compiled and rendered as a
           | PDF.
           | 
           | If all you're doing is writing prose then I honestly think
           | typesetting programs are overkill _unless_ you do want very
           | fine grained control over how your documents look.
        
           | Winsaucerer wrote:
           | You've had some good replies already, but just want to add my
           | thoughts. Markdown to me is more about (a) the content (the
           | actual words) and (b) the semantics (text emphasis, headings,
           | etc, which communicate information about the importance or
           | meaning of particular things).
           | 
           | Typesetting systems like Typst or LaTeX go beyond this.
           | They're also about presentation, how precisely it is laid
           | out, on mediums such as print or PDF. Is that something you
           | need? If you care more about the content and its meaning, and
           | are happy to have it rendered differently in different
           | situations (a preview in Visual Studio Code, or passed
           | through a markdown-to-html renderer, or viewed in Obsidian,
           | etc), then Markdown might not just be fine, it may be
           | preferable. But if you need to do things like print this on
           | paper for mailing, email in a PDF, that sort of thing, then
           | you'll want something more.
        
             | thangalin wrote:
             | A few Markdown documents I've converted to PDFs:
             | 
             | * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
             | 
             | * https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/technical.pdf
             | 
             | * https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/jekyll-hyde.pdf
             | 
             | Respectfully, keeping presentation logic and content
             | completely separated while having precise control over
             | layout can happen with Markdown, as the example documents
             | demonstrate. The ConTeXt typesetting system makes keeping
             | such separation possible.
             | 
             | The deeper issue relates to the software's architecture,
             | which, IMO, systems like Typst, Obsidian, and others fail
             | to generalize broadly enough. Here's KeenWrite's
             | architecture (the "Proposed" row):
             | 
             | https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/raw/main/docs/ima
             | g...
             | 
             | Although only Markdown is currently implemented, it's
             | possible to plug other text-based input formats to produce
             | an XHTML document. The instructions for how to typeset
             | XHTML documents are defined by a theme. You can think of a
             | theme as an XML to TeX translation layer. From there, going
             | from XML to TeX is straightforward (when using ConTeXt, at
             | least), allowing full control over the final output format
             | (be it PDF, ePub, and so forth).
             | 
             | I am the author of KeenWrite. The following tutorial shows
             | how its themes work:
             | 
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30&list=PLB-
             | WIt1cZY...
        
         | gumbojuice wrote:
         | Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that,
         | journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges
         | to LaTeX/Word would fall in place.
         | 
         | For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I
         | most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the
         | institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source).
         | 
         | Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of
         | IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles
         | to LaTeX.
        
           | tapia wrote:
           | The only thing I need to start writing more serious documents
           | with Typst is an equivalent to latexdiff. But I really think
           | (and hope) that this will replace latex in the future. Alone
           | the compilation time makes it so much nice to use! Meanwhile
           | I am supporting them by having a pro account, which is not
           | even so expensive.
        
           | 2cynykyl wrote:
           | Arxiv will accept a rendered pdf, no source files required.
           | Are any special features unlocked if source files are
           | uploaded?
        
             | CJefferson wrote:
             | They autoconvert latex to html. Typst can't currently
             | produce html output.
        
               | wiktor-k wrote:
               | Just for completeness the html export issue is here:
               | https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
        
               | Onawa wrote:
               | Quarto can convert to typst, html, and LaTeX through
               | pandoc.
        
         | thomas34298 wrote:
         | FWIW there is already partial LaTeX support for Typst via the
         | mitex package:
         | 
         | https://github.com/mitex-rs/mitex
        
           | returningfory2 wrote:
           | This is interesting! However, I suspect general TeX support
           | in Typst is probably impossible unless you re-implement the
           | entirety of TeX within Typst somehow. The TeX language has
           | some really terrible properties. For example, the
           | tokenization rules can be dynamically changed at runtime
           | based on the output that has already been produced. E.g. you
           | can write a TeX file that says "typeset this paragraph, and
           | if the result is an odd number of lines, change the meaning
           | of A from letter to open brace". Thus, fully supporting TeX
           | within Typst would seem to require making all of the
           | internals of Typst available to the TeX runtime.
        
       | mkl wrote:
       | A number of past discussions and related things:
       | https://hn.algolia.com/?q=typst
       | 
       | 1 year ago, 146 comments:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210
       | 
       | 8 months ago, 34 comments:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422
       | 
       | 2 years ago, 53 comments:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590
       | 
       | 2 years ago 30 comments:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209794
        
         | PhilippGille wrote:
         | And this new post likely triggered by
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41006565
        
       | pocket_titan wrote:
       | I've been finding Typst a great tool for ~90% of my use-cases --
       | in the other 10%, I'll still reach for LaTeX for the extra power
       | (tikz, pdf images, tagged pdfs (!) (this is becoming more and
       | more of a requirement when publishing/submitting academic texts,
       | and AFAIK Typst does not support it yet), but that's okay.
       | Excited to see where it goes, as LaTeX is very beginner
       | unfriendly and I'd love to see the barrier to entry for
       | typesetting lowered so my more non-technical friends can share in
       | the power of pretty texts & CVs.
        
         | joooscha wrote:
         | At least for a tikz equivalent, I found cetz [1] to be very
         | useful. I am not sure how it compares feature-wise. But I could
         | easily build some graphs with it.
         | 
         | The one thing that really makes me excited when using Typst is
         | that I find it very intuitive, meaning the time between not
         | knowing how to do a certain thing and me being pleased with the
         | result is much shorter with Typst compared to latex.
         | 
         | [1]: https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz/
        
       | Neywiny wrote:
       | This feels like a mix of markdown readability with latex control.
       | I'm not sure yet that I need that middle ground. Currently I'm
       | doing docs in markdown, reports in Python generated tex, coupled
       | with hardcoded preambles. That seems fine so far.
        
       | fhd2 wrote:
       | Seems like it's not built on top of LaTex, so you presumably
       | can't drop into LaTex when Typst can't do what you need, or did I
       | just miss that?
       | 
       | LaTex is positively arcane, but I still use it for all my writing
       | since it's so incredibly versatile: Academic papers, letters,
       | contracts, forms, invoices, tons of packages, pretty easy to
       | apply regional standards, ...
       | 
       | How I manage to not go insane is Org Mode: I can write almost
       | everything in something similar to Markdown but do inline LaTex
       | as needed (since it compiles from Org to Latex to PDF). I find
       | that incredibly powerful.
        
         | mr_mitm wrote:
         | True, it can't fall back to LaTeX. It's not there yet, but give
         | them some time and there won't be any cases that Typst can't do
         | that LaTeX can. It's already impressively close if you ask me.
        
         | arnsholt wrote:
         | The genius of TeX is that it's a programming language for
         | document production, that can mostly look like markup. The
         | further genius(?) is that the language works in such a way that
         | you can do more or less arbitrarily complex things, while still
         | exposing an interface to the user that feels like markup. This
         | makes for a language that is sometimes, honestly, completely
         | bananas. But when wielded correctly, it's great.
        
           | SkiFire13 wrote:
           | Typst is also a programming language for document production,
           | however they made the decision to make the code side an
           | actual scripting language, which makes writing custom logic
           | much easier than in Latex.
        
       | mr_mitm wrote:
       | I can't wait for LaTeX to go away in favor of Typst. The
       | experience is night and day. Very impressed with their work.
       | 
       | I've been using Jinja2 templates to generate TeX files, but Typst
       | can take a JSON over the command line and is easy to use and
       | powerful enough that I can completely remove the Python step.
       | 
       | Not to speak of the compile time that is measured in
       | milliseconds.
        
         | Winsaucerer wrote:
         | Yes, the scripting is very nice. At first, I played around with
         | Go templates to generate the Typst templates, since that is
         | what I was used to doing with LaTeX. It was very nice to
         | discover it allows you to use JSON with its scripting engine
         | directly pretty easily.
        
       | Ilasky wrote:
       | I love Typst. It's especially good for dealing with programmatic
       | input as the --input flag can take json. [0] Then, in the file
       | it's easy to get the json with the dedicated json.decode()
       | function. Super easy to get solid results. Swapped to it from
       | LaTeX in my own project [1]
       | 
       | [0] https://typst.app/docs/reference/foundations/sys/
       | 
       | [1] https://resgen.app
        
       | MaxBarraclough wrote:
       | I'm surprised to see that HTML output is currently in progress,
       | and was not a core feature from the start. [0]
       | 
       | LaTeX's awkward relationship with the web seems like something a
       | competing greenfield project would try to nail right out of the
       | gate (to mix metaphors painfully).
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
        
         | Kinrany wrote:
         | Someone mentioned that pandoc works decently for this.
        
           | alphabeta2024 wrote:
           | It does not.
        
           | ykonstant wrote:
           | I am using pandoc to transfer some of my notes to the web:
           | https://ykonstant1.github.io/power-draft.html
        
             | nicf wrote:
             | I've been doing something similar, and it looks like you've
             | managed to solve a problem I've been unable to: how did you
             | get theorem and section numbering to work right?
        
               | hgyjnbdet wrote:
               | Not the OP but I use pandoc-crossref for this:
               | https://lierdakil.github.io/pandoc-crossref/
        
         | CJefferson wrote:
         | Yes, latex's HTML output is fairly good nowadays, after a lot
         | of people made very heroic efforts to put it in a system never
         | intended to support it.
         | 
         | Starting a new markup system with no plan for making accessible
         | documents was, in my opinion, a very bad idea. I refuse to use
         | typst until it can produce accessible documents.
        
           | nanna wrote:
           | > Yes, latex's HTML output is fairly good nowadays, after a
           | lot of people made very heroic efforts to put it in a system
           | never intended to support it.
           | 
           | Mind saying more? Didn't know there'd been progress here.
        
             | amai wrote:
             | Have a look at https://ctan.org/pkg/lwarp and
             | https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/ .
        
         | slashdave wrote:
         | I assume you know that tex predates the web by many years?
        
           | IshKebab wrote:
           | Nothing in his comment suggested he was unaware of that so
           | I'm not sure why you're asking.
        
           | kerkeslager wrote:
           | So? If I'm a modern user who needs my typesetting system to
           | generate HTML, I'm not going to "forgive" a typesetting
           | system because it's older than the web and use it even though
           | it doesn't do what I need.
        
         | cactusfrog wrote:
         | Yes, this is one of the major problems with this. I don't like
         | pdfs
        
       | renerick wrote:
       | I make TTRPG character sheets with Typst. No only they look great
       | with perfect page layout, the programming capabilities allow to
       | compute everything from ability scores automatically, like Excel.
       | It's really well designed, and fast too, VS Code integration just
       | works (for me at least)
        
       | kkfx wrote:
       | LaTeX is not just a set of macros over TeX to produce (nowadays)
       | some pdf, it's a very big library of ready-to-use packages for
       | pretty anything, that's VERY hard to "substitute".
       | 
       | You want inspiration for some strange table layouts? There are
       | gazillion ready made; some graph? TiKz/PGF have gazillions of
       | ready made examples... Want a programming language in the middle?
       | Python, Lua etc can be embedded straight away.
       | 
       | So far I've seen few tentative to "replace or hide LaTeX", from
       | the old DocBook to ConTeXt, no one succeed simply because of all
       | the LaTeX already made and easy to import. Having alternatives,
       | especially seen the actual "fragmented" development is nice, but
       | honestly I doubt it can take off. Proprietary products are fast
       | to wane in popularity if a serious competitor pops up because the
       | users does not own them, FLOSS are much calmer since anyone can
       | grab a piece and integrate ideas of someone else without the need
       | to switch.
        
         | kleiba wrote:
         | Exactly. It's not too difficult to imagine replacing LaTeX for
         | some fairly straight-forward documents. But just by casually
         | browsing tex.stackexchange.com, you'll soon find out that
         | people use LaTeX for an amazingly wide range of different
         | things, and it's capable of serving many, many edge cases very
         | well. To be on par with that is a very hard goal. Let's not
         | forget, LaTeX has been around forever, and consequently has
         | grown into an incredible complex and varied ecosystem.
        
           | jonnycomputer wrote:
           | I mean, the same is true for Emacs. But that hasn't stopped
           | other editors (e.g. VSCode) from developing large vibrant
           | communities of users and tooling.
        
             | JohnKemeny wrote:
             | But Emacs isn't a requirement by half the STEM research
             | community, LaTeX is.
             | 
             | Typst is not replacing LaTeX in general and should stop
             | advertising being a LaTeX replacement. It isn't a
             | competitor.
        
               | thomas34298 wrote:
               | Not everything revolves around scientific journals and
               | their archaic rules. For my team Typst was a perfect
               | LaTeX replacement and we've been happy ever since we
               | switched. It is easier to understand, has faster compile
               | times and is more powerful without enabling shell escape.
               | However, we're not in the business of writing scientific
               | papers, we write technical reports for our customers. If
               | it wasn't advertised as a LaTeX replacement, we might
               | never have found out about it.
        
         | kerkeslager wrote:
         | > Want a programming language in the middle? Python, Lua etc
         | can be embedded straight away.
         | 
         | After using templating languages in Python, yes, I always want
         | this when using LaTeX. And as of ~2 years ago when I last tried
         | this, while sure, I could embed Python in the middle, the
         | interface for interacting with LaTeX via the embedded Python
         | was anemic enough to be not useful. Maybe something had changed
         | in the last 2 years, but if so, it's not more mature.
         | 
         | Example: I wanted to have a daily meditation book, where
         | \chapter{Title} would insert the dates in order with the title
         | of the meditation, instead of chapter numbers, also inserting a
         | table of contents entry with the dates. What I _didn 't_ want
         | was to have to go through and change dates if I added a
         | meditation in the middle, or swapped the order of meditations.
         | I'm not picky, I would've been happy to use \section{Title} or
         | \meditation{Title}, or script a solution.
         | 
         | What happened was I spent probably 6 hours of research and
         | never found a solution integrated into LaTeX. I did eventually
         | write a script in Python that naively parsed the chapter titles
         | and changed them in-placed in the LaTeX code, but that meant I
         | had to regenerate the dates as a separate task.
         | 
         | Note that this took me about 5 minutes to figure out with
         | Typst's integrated scripting language.
        
       | mr-karan wrote:
       | Typst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we're very
       | happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every
       | night and experimented with various solutions--from Puppeteer for
       | HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been
       | several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource
       | footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn't a pleasant
       | developer experience, but with Typst templates, it has been quite
       | intuitive.
       | 
       | We've written more about this large-scale PDF generation stack in
       | our blog here: https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-
       | in-25-minutes
        
         | sitkack wrote:
         | What is the use case for generating that many PDFs?
        
           | mr-karan wrote:
           | Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India
           | are required to generate this document called "Contract
           | Notes" which includes all the trades done by the user on the
           | stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges
           | incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this
           | has to be emailed to every user before the next trading
           | session begins.
        
             | bjourne wrote:
             | There are of course way more efficient methods for
             | generating templated pdfs than using a typesetter.
        
               | cameroncooper wrote:
               | I'm interested to hear what you would propose.
        
               | abound wrote:
               | Not sure what GP had in mind, but one can
               | programmatically generate PDFs directly, without using
               | something like Typst as a "middleman".
        
               | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
               | Have you tried doing that? It's no fun at all and far
               | from easy. I don't quite see a benefit in doing it
               | without some utility.
        
               | a57721 wrote:
               | Besides, the generation of PDF reports is usually
               | decoupled from the templates, so you will have to work on
               | your own "middleman".
        
               | wolfi1 wrote:
               | I guess some webkit solution like wkhtmltopdf
        
               | mr_mitm wrote:
               | How is that more efficient than Typst exactly?
        
               | bjourne wrote:
               | Apache iText, for example.
        
             | IshKebab wrote:
             | Does the law specify PDF? I would have thought pain text or
             | even HTML would be sufficient.
        
               | the_mitsuhiko wrote:
               | I don't know the situation in India but brokers in
               | Austria and Germany do the same. The law does not
               | stipulate the format but PDF is what everyone uses. I
               | assume it's because it can be signed and archived and
               | will outlast pretty much anything. You need to keep these
               | for 7 years.
        
               | mr-karan wrote:
               | Yes, in India, the law mandates that ECNs (electronic
               | contract notes) need to be digitally signed with a valid
               | certifying authority. While it's true that XML/docx/xls
               | files could also support digital signatures, but I think
               | PDFs are prevalent and also allow clients to verify this
               | on their end, quite easily.
        
               | yukeabu wrote:
               | PDF is less likely to contain executable malicious code
               | than other formats.
        
               | radicality wrote:
               | Is it? More so than say .csv file ?
               | 
               | I was under the impressions that pdfs are not that safe.
               | I thought they can do stuff like execute a subset of
               | PostScript and Javascript.
        
         | happimess wrote:
         | This is a really great write up. Kudos for the obvious effort,
         | both on the technical side and sharing the process with the
         | rest of us.
        
         | dudus wrote:
         | Have you tried reportlab as well? It was a good solution when I
         | had to deal with a similar problem many moons ago. Not quite
         | the same volume you have but still.
        
           | kerkeslager wrote:
           | Having used ReportLab a bunch, I'd agree it's a good
           | solution, but not maybe on the more mediocre side of good.
           | Generating LaTeX was a better solution for me, and while I
           | haven't used it, Typst looks a lot better.
        
         | znpy wrote:
         | Just wondering: did your organisation contribute anything back
         | to the project, or supported it financially in any way?
        
         | mstijak wrote:
         | Never heard that someone is generating PDF documents at that
         | pace. I'm working on a product that is used for mass PDF
         | reporting based on Puppeteer. With nightly jobs, caching, and
         | parallel processing, the performance is ok.
         | 
         | https://www.cx-reports.com
        
       | humanfromearth9 wrote:
       | So, anyone using it?
        
         | renerick wrote:
         | Hypermedia.Systems does - https://dz4k.com/2024/new-hypermedia-
         | systems/
         | 
         | https://hypermedia.systems
        
       | bucephalos wrote:
       | Nowadays, I use Latex mainly for letters using the great KOMA
       | package. I wouldn't mind switching to a markdown based system for
       | that. Would Typst work to produce DIN format letters?
        
         | mr_mitm wrote:
         | Yes: https://typst.app/universe/package/letter-pro/
        
           | bucephalos wrote:
           | Awesome, thanks!
        
       | ThinkBeat wrote:
       | Where does it get its font from?
        
         | chambored wrote:
         | I believe you can run a command to point its font options to a
         | directory.
        
       | pgen wrote:
       | I personally prefer ConTeXt
       | (https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone).
       | 
       | It's comparable to LaTeX, but better in my opinion.
        
         | nanna wrote:
         | I could never get my head around the use case for ConTeXt. It
         | seemed like LaTeX minus defaults that have been defined by
         | typographers and the massive ecosystem. Care to say more?
        
       | karencarits wrote:
       | I guess this is a competitor to services such as overleaf [1] and
       | codimd [2]. Although this is yet another syntax, it seems to be
       | supported by pandoc [3]. Lately, I have been using Quarto [4]
       | more and more as I program in R, which also produces very nice
       | outputs, especially HTML. But none of these solve the academic
       | usage problems of (1) producing nice diffs for reviewers, and (2)
       | can easily be shared with, and commented by, non-technical
       | collaborators. Thus, I fear Word will be difficult to replace for
       | many years, at least in my field, for scientific writing
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf
       | 
       | [2] https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd
       | 
       | [3] https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output.html
       | 
       | [4] https://quarto.org/
        
         | countrymile wrote:
         | I've been using quarto a lot too. I've found the typst pdf
         | travel output to be a bit rougher than latex pdf when using GT.
         | Hopefully something that will get fixed.
        
       | Aerbil313 wrote:
       | I'm a college student and I use Typst in school all the time. I
       | know I should just use Google Docs/Sheets, but because it's code
       | instead of a WYSIWYG editor it's very easy to create reusable and
       | consistent styles for reports and presentations, and saves time
       | on the long run. (I use polylux module for slides.) Once you get
       | past the learning curve (10-15 hrs if you nosedive) it's
       | incredibly easy to create professional stuff.
        
         | spidersouris wrote:
         | touying[1] seems quite great to create slides too.
         | 
         | [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/touying/
        
       | xyst wrote:
       | This is very easy to use compared to latex. My latex resume (or
       | the template I was using) was thousands of lines and had several
       | imports of custom classes.
       | 
       | Re-did my resume using one of their templates, and it's much
       | easier to maintain now.
        
       | rochak wrote:
       | Have been using it for a while. Can't overstate how much better
       | the experience has been compared to LaTeX. As someone who had to
       | use LaTeX not out of choice, I'm so grateful this exists so that
       | I can no longer bother to decipher the mess of LateX.
        
       | spacebuffer wrote:
       | This is very interesting, seems to be like LaTex + a whole lot
       | more.
       | 
       | I need to generate udemy-style certificates for a project I am
       | working on. are there any guides on generating PDFs with typst?
        
       | byteplane wrote:
       | I'd be happy if this takes off just for the fact that their
       | default typeface (or at least the one shown on the website) is so
       | much better than "Computer Modern"!
        
       | anserin wrote:
       | The main problem I have with Typst compared with LaTeX is that it
       | doesn't handle basic fine typographic features, such as the
       | different types of spacing in mathematical mode (mathop, mathbin,
       | mathrel, etc.) or the size of delimiters (big, bigg, etc.)
        
         | StableAlkyne wrote:
         | It also seems to have problems with accessibility, based on
         | this thread - https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/133
         | 
         | But then again, apparently so does LaTeX
        
         | xkevio wrote:
         | Am I misunderstanding what exactly you are looking for? You can
         | change the spacing in math mode of symbols/operators with
         | https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/class/ and delimiter size
         | with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/lr#functions-lr (or
         | automatically).
        
       | amai wrote:
       | Quarto already supports typst: https://quarto.org/docs/output-
       | formats/typst.html
        
       | amai wrote:
       | Unfortunately out of the box typst is missing an important layout
       | features compared to Latex: the auto-generation of headers
       | (showing the section name in the header). There are some packages
       | that help you with that:
       | 
       | - https://typst.app/universe/package/hydra,
       | 
       | - https://typst.app/universe/package/chic-hdr
       | 
       | - https://typst.app/universe/package/wonderous-book
       | 
       | However I believe this functionality should be available in the
       | typst core.
        
         | fbdab103 wrote:
         | Practically nothing in Latex comes out of the box. Sure, you
         | can bang out markdown-esque formatted text, but the moment you
         | need something more complicated, say URLs, graphics, resize the
         | margins, etc you are likely going to be pulling in a package.
         | 
         | No true scotsman and all that, but I suspect few documents in
         | the wild are bare Latex.
        
           | amai wrote:
           | But the feature I'm talking about comes out of the box. One
           | just writes
           | 
           | \documentclass[twoside]{article}
           | 
           | \pagestyle{headings}
           | 
           | in LaTeX. And this also does the right thing on special pages
           | like table of content, appendix, bibliography etc.
           | 
           | Implementing all that in Typst is quite a hassle.
        
       | kerkeslager wrote:
       | This is the sort of thing that I'm excited about because it
       | solves problems I have, but can't really use for much because I'm
       | not sure if it will exist in a year.
        
       | trostaft wrote:
       | I'm following the progress of this package, I would not mind a
       | more modern successor to LaTeX. I'm an academic, and I actually
       | do not mind LaTeX. I find actually writing LaTeX to be fairly
       | natural. But every time I come to the programmatic interface I
       | feel like there's a lot of room for improvement and that's the
       | most exciting aspect of typst.
       | 
       | I cannot, reasonably, start using this for work until journals
       | begin accepting papers in the format. But I am following until
       | either that starts happening, or some workaround exists.
        
         | fastasucan wrote:
         | Have you tried out Quarto?
        
           | chambored wrote:
           | I've been using Quarto for a few years now. It's quite a
           | breeze to use. Highly recommend to anyone looking to publish
           | technical writing on their static site.
        
       | __mharrison__ wrote:
       | I would love to replace latex but I only use it for making
       | physical books and none of the replacements have the features
       | needed...
        
       | Duanemclemore wrote:
       | Oh it's pandoc compatible which means my favorite LaTeX trick is
       | possible - writing in an IDE then using pandoc to convert to icml
       | for linking inside InDesign.
        
       | hgyjnbdet wrote:
       | I saw this come up today in a different thread.
       | 
       | I'm a mature undergrad, I've never used LaTeX, actively avoided
       | it in fact and am forced to produce word documents. My current
       | workflow is pandoc style markdown and obviously pandoc for
       | conversion, with zotero for citations. I make use of pandoc-
       | crossref for figures, tables, sections, etc.
       | 
       | I'm hopefully moving to a different uni for a masters this year.
       | Can anyone who uses typst comment on whether I should consider
       | moving from my fairly complicated workflow to typst?
        
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