[HN Gopher] Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
___________________________________________________________________
Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
Author : pykello
Score : 622 points
Date : 2025-09-27 07:31 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| imiric wrote:
| Typst is great. I'm sure it's not a complete LaTeX replacement,
| given the dominance of TeX for many decades, but for simple
| documents it's a breath of fresh air.
|
| Not having to deal with the insanity of the LaTeX distribution
| system alone is worth the switch. Everything is contained in a
| single binary. The language itself is much simpler to read and
| write, and seems just as flexible. LLMs do a decent job of
| generating it. Compilation takes less than a second, making it so
| much faster to iterate.
|
| Many thanks to the authors and contributors, and please don't
| ruin it. :)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Assuming it's at all desirable, it's an interesting and recurring
| problem of how to dislodge existing sub-optimal (sometimes even
| harmful) standards and notations.
|
| Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know
| something similar.
|
| Creates a heck of a momentum effect, not just from the
| practitioners resisting the change, but also available resources
| and so on.
| benrutter wrote:
| > Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already
| know something similar.
|
| I think it depends on what the thing is. I use LaTeX for
| occasional documentation, a better version would save me a
| maximum of 5 minutes a year. I probably won't be an early Typst
| adopter.
|
| But, I spend loads of time for example, working with dataframes
| in Python. I got into Polars fairly early because improvements
| in that space can massively affect my productivity.
|
| If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent
| learning something new isn't comparably large.
| nbernard wrote:
| > If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time
| spent learning something new isn't comparably large.
|
| I don't know. By then aren't you quite comfortable with
| LaTeX?
|
| It may be Stockholm syndrome and sunk costs speaking, but I'm
| using LaTeX all the time: I quite like it and I don't feel
| any need for something else to replace it...
| setr wrote:
| Text editors progress one funeral at a time.
| nbernard wrote:
| Scientific text editors, you mean? ;)
|
| I suspect it is actually worse than that and that they
| are actually subject to the Lindy effect (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect ).
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Folks who know latex would benefit the most from typst,
| just from the compiling aspect.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| If a better Latex only saves you 5 minutes per year, then
| that means, that you are either a latex god, who types 200wpm
| in special characters and talks latex fluently, or, that you
| don't actually write much documentation per year, or, that
| someone else has invested significant time to create all the
| document layout, macros, environments, etc. so that you only
| need to type the text.
|
| My point is, that creating a proper latex document, specific
| to one's use case can consume many hours of time.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| See: YAML, JS, /etc structure, credit cards in US...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Keyboards being modeled after typewriters, unit of electrical
| charge being negative, pi being half a turn, etc.
|
| Our basis vectors are very much wide of the mark.
| spookie wrote:
| We... have failed so much...
| josephg wrote:
| > Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already
| know something similar.
|
| Yeah, I wrote a paper using typst - which was much more
| pleasant to draft. But for the final version submitted to the
| journal, we ended up converting it to latex because that's what
| the journal wanted.
|
| I think it'll be hard to dislodge latex for academic papers -
| particularly in CS. But there's plenty of other uses for it.
| Personally I'm looking forward to HTML output. I want to use it
| to write blog posts and long form documentation. (Markdown
| simply isn't powerful enough for my needs.)
| bonoboTP wrote:
| If the software is actually good, it can start from an
| enthusiastic core of students, PhD students and later niche
| conference organizers and niche journal editors and if they
| gossip about their experience, it can spread through word of
| mouth if it's sufficiently good.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I think this is correct, with the added caveat that it
| must be as good as the alternative PLUS the awkwardness of
| switching to have any hopes of breaking out of the local
| minimum.
|
| Otherwise you become Dvorak, which despite being better than
| Qwerty and having been around for almost a hundred years,
| still hasn't seen widespread adoption, in this case because
| the awkwardness of switching is very significant. The effect
| is likely smaller on something like Typst.
| lupire wrote:
| Dvorak is only slightly better than Qwerty at most.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > it's an interesting and recurring problem of how to dislodge
| existing sub-optimal (sometimes even harmful) standards and
| notations.
|
| > Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already
| know something similar.
|
| There are lots of people (myself included) who genuinely like
| LaTeX, so it's not _just_ inertia preventing people from
| switching (although that is definitely a significant factor).
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I'm convinced no one really knows tex/latex. Everyone googles
| enough to get by.
|
| Typst on the other hand is completely sensible.
|
| It takes less time to learn typst than to refresh on latex.
| renerick wrote:
| Typst is fantastic and I recommend to dive into it to see how
| much value it offers. To me personally, the biggest strength is
| the ergonomics of both the tooling and the language, and how
| ergonomics persist even between documents of various complexity.
| Writing a paper in LaTeX is nice, but making something like a CV
| takes some patience. Meanwhile, in typst it was quick to get
| started and go all the way to building resumes, character sheets,
| and I know of at least one occurrence of implementing symbolic
| math in typst language. It's not without quirks, but still, very
| solid alternative
| chanux wrote:
| I maintained my CV in Latex for years (originally got started
| on this due to the fear of MS Word) and recently tried out
| Typst. I agree with you that it's quite simple to get started
| with. Also, I had to maintain a Ubuntu based Docker image with
| everything needed for the build.
|
| Also if anyone is looking for a little help in getting started,
| LLMs are pretty decent at converting (and I forget which one I
| used).
| klabetron wrote:
| My CV is still in LaTeX which gives me the opportunity to
| procrastinate updating it (rather than actually applying for
| jobs) because of all of the tweaking I do.
|
| If nothing else, typist is going go give me more
| opportunities to procrastinate! Nice.
| specproc wrote:
| All I've done in Typst is my CV, I saw it here a while back and
| thought it'd be a nice use case.
|
| It took about a day to get my head round the language an
| another to get it looking like I wanted. It's pretty simple,
| but I found it easy to run up and maintain.
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| God it's so much easier than LaTeX. I wrote so many things in
| LaTeX over the years, and writing (and debugging) switching to
| Typst felt like, well, like somebody had been fighting me every
| step of the way, and then finally stopped. I'm not going back, if
| I can help it.
|
| But I will say I've mostly written relatively simple documents in
| it, so maybe that colors my experience.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| I just found out https://typst.app/play/ - this is an absolute
| gamechanger. Tried it for a minute, but already loving it.
| notpushkin wrote:
| This is basically their monetization strategy btw - the SaaS
| offering is exactly this app, but with cloud sync and
| collaboration features. This part is proprietary, sadly, but
| I'd say fair enough considering it pays for the compiler and
| other tooling (FOSS).
| arendtio wrote:
| It even supports vim bindings :-)
| thrance wrote:
| I've tried pushing Typst on my academic friends. One of them
| listened and eventually wrote his entire PhD thesis with it. He
| didn't seem to regret it.
| commandersaki wrote:
| These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when
| comparing with LaTeX:
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
| josephg wrote:
| 8. Programming with it is lovely. Its got a little interpreted
| language built in, with helper functions like
| json("some_file.json"). I wrote a paper in it, and used that
| extensively to populate all my result tables. (Benchmark script
| -> JSON files -> typst compiled the results directly into the
| PDF).
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Have you compared this to using lua in lualatex?
| kzrdude wrote:
| The fast preview makes it a fun environment for interactive
| graphical/visual programming. With some limitations,
| unfortunately no animations and don't try to create thousands
| of objects or curves, the language server will run out of
| memory and have to be restarted.
| repeekad wrote:
| Is what you're describing something that latex handles
| well? I'm no expert, but that problem seems solvable by
| rendering previews with say sampling of large or complex
| objects vs full builds that maybe take a minute if high
| fidelity animations or very large graphs are desired as a
| supported use case in something fully open source
| lupire wrote:
| LaTeX comping/rendering is generally extremely slow.
| yodaDrofnats wrote:
| TeX is slow?!
|
| Writing and editing an entire book manuscript is slow.
|
| For pesky TeX chaos smashups, you create a small
| dedicated TeX file with necessary driver files, edit-
| compile-loop till satisfied.
|
| Twenty years ago I ran a makefile producing 1755 pages on
| a 32 bit INTeL CPU. This was just to see what a fat book
| would look like, thousands of edits remained, still
| remain. All the two-column formatting was fine, except
| for problems of long equations and tables blowing up
| beyond the column, and other mess I couldn't solve. The
| compile run time was insignificant.
|
| BTW its laTeX not LaTeX.
|
| Donald Knuth's original creation will ever be infinitely
| more significant than the sprawling ocean of all the
| crumpled paper bag shenanigans Leslie and whomever-
| ephemeral else, RUSTy-paper-clips to the side.
|
| De Laude Scriptorum
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I've said that in Typst, when you're writing, it feels like
| writing, and when you're programming, it feels like
| programming. Whereas LaTeX always feels almost, but not
| quite, entirely unlike programming.
| foobarian wrote:
| The primary feeling I get from using LaTeX is: fear. Any
| little special thing I adjust tends to break the document,
| or move figures, or fixing one thing breaks another and so
| on. And forget about changing templates.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| My paranoid workflow is that I have to make many
| subdivisions of the document so that I can trivially
| enable/disable components when I am triaging a problem.
| When something breaks, I am less reliant on the garbage
| error messages.
|
| So the top-level document is just a long list of inputs
| \input{intro} \input{prelude}
| \input{complex_figure1} ...
|
| The side benefit is that I can disable all but the
| component on which I am directly working, so compilation
| is faster.
| tentahedronic wrote:
| My general advice here for you and many others in this
| thread would be to switch to Context (or even Luametatex
| if you really want to make some truly crazy stuff,
| basically it's just a newer and more experimental version
| of Context) if you are not happy with things and like to
| do your own customizations and don't bother becoming a
| TeX wizard. Latex is super if you are fine with the
| template you are provided or you absolutely need some
| obscurish package, otherwise Context is similar enough
| and bending it to your will is pretty much how it's
| supposed to be used.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| Nice Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference! That's my
| favourite quote from it :)
|
| For others, here's the quote being referenced:
|
| > After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was
| beginning to reassemble itself from the shellshocked
| fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found
| a Nutri--Matic machine which had provided him with a
| plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not
| quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very
| interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an
| instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's
| taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's
| metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the
| neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain
| to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one
| knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered
| a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely
| unlike tea.
| phi-go wrote:
| As you wrote a paper, how difficult would you say is it to
| recreate the template of the venue you submitted to?
| colelyman wrote:
| I haven't explicitly recreated a template for an academic
| venue, but I have recreated a custom template to match and
| existing PDF. It was pretty straightforward to recreate it
| as the language and "standard library" (if you could call
| it that?) is well designed and has excellent documentation.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| Oooh that is nice. I have long relied on various conversion
| hacks to update data tables (mostly settled on pandoc
| markdown), but that little usability nugget is worth quite a
| bit to me.
| toxik wrote:
| Have you tried actually writing an article with it? I had very
| limited success. And since nobody is using it really, you're
| kind of on your own.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Nah, just work documents (built in CI), resume, legal
| documents, ad-hoc documents. Publishing is not really in my
| purview.
| gignico wrote:
| Actually number 5 is not an issue. Defining macros in the
| preamble is a custom but you can define macros anywhere.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You can define macros anywhere you want, but you can only load
| packages in the preamble (before \begin{document}). I'm not
| familiar with Typst, but I would assume that it also requires
| you to load packages at the top of the document (or at least
| that's the only place that you would _want_ to load packages).
|
| > 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you
| use semantic line breaks.
|
| Semantic line breaks should be totally fine with LaTeX too.
|
| > 2. Compiling is instant.
|
| > 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like
| Rust compiler suggestion style).
|
| Agreed, these are definitely LaTeX's biggest weaknesses.
| mastermage wrote:
| I am 95% sure that you can import wherever you want. I
| remember doing it with Tables i defined in an extra document
| and then imported only where i actually needed them.
| fn-mote wrote:
| There are multiple kinds of import in latex.
|
| The GP specifically mentions packages, so means
| \usepackage.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Actually, you can't specify macros _anywhere_. Unlike TeX, it's
| a real honest-to-goodness programming language with functions
| and types and modules (yes! It has namespaces!) instead of just
| macros on macros on macros.
|
| It's not perfect, they definitely made some interesting choices
| here and there, but this makes it ~80% less painful than TeX
| when you're doing anything other than happy-path undergrad-lab-
| report writing.
|
| (To be clear, I know you know this! I'm writing this for the
| benefit of all sentient beings :))
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| > 5 bloody files
|
| For those that have to use latex for various reasons, but
| absolutely hate these files from intermediate compiler passes,
| here are two aliases from my .bashrc
| latexloop() { latexmk -pdf -pvc -emulate-aux-dir -aux-
| directory=/tmp/latexcrap "$@"; } alias
| latexmk='latexmk -pdf -emulate-aux-dir -aux-
| directory=/tmp/latexcrap'
|
| You can now `latexmk file.tex` and it will put all the
| auxiliary files in /tmp/latexcrap.
|
| The `latexloop file.tex` invocation is just a helper that hot-
| reloads when you save the tex file.
| baby wrote:
| Oh wow, I was hopping something would come along with better
| friendlier errors like modern programming languages
| fithisux wrote:
| I used it for a presentation. Easy for the basics but it felt
| like a down grade from Latex or TeXmacs
| F3nd0 wrote:
| TeXmacs is pretty great. I feel like its internals still feel a
| bit arcane, though. Just editing documents through the
| graphical interface is fine, but if you happen to use some
| commonplace symbols or diacritics a lot, opening the file as
| plain text will quickly remind you of it, with bespoke ASCII
| representations showing up in their place.
| defanor wrote:
| Among alternative typesetting systems, there is also SILE, which
| supports two syntaxes (XML-based and TeX-style), supports
| scripting in lua, comes with freely available sort-of-
| specification (unlike (La)TeX or Typst, unless one counts program
| sources as specification). For formulae, it additionally allows
| direct MathML input. I have not used either Typst or SILE though,
| only looked into their documentation.
|
| HTML with MathML may make a decent system as well; possibly with
| an XML source and XSLT for templating, which is apparently how
| OpenStax textbooks are composed (via CNXML, though that also has
| just a couple of rain frog pictures in its documentation
| repository -- seems to be a common pattern around typesetting
| systems).
|
| Then there is troff with eqn(1), which looks simpler, but not
| sure if there is an actual specification for it around, either.
|
| And then there are Texinfo, org-mode with LaTeX embedding, other
| TeX-adjacent options, perhaps Markdown with HTML and MathML
| embedding.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| > HTML with MathML may make a decent system as well
|
| HTML is fine to write by hand (especially when you take
| advantage of tag omission [0]), but I can't imagine handwriting
| MathML, since even simple equations need _lots_ of tags [1].
|
| [0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#syntax-
| ta...
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Presentation_and_semant...
| defanor wrote:
| It is indeed considerably more verbose, especially the
| "context" version (the one focusing on semantics, rather than
| presentation), and I did not write much of it myself, but I
| can imagine it being fine. It should not be a bottleneck for
| carefully (and slowly) composed documents, while for more
| casual and quick notes, even with LaTeX it appears to be
| common to use both a preview (often inline) and some input
| assistance, avoiding completely manual handwriting. Besides,
| as the linked Wikipedia article mentions, it is rather like
| expressions in Lisp-family programming languages (or pretty
| much any common ones, if you avoid infix operators), which
| are not that bad. I imagine it may also be more convenient
| (and terse) in combination with SXML or KDL, to avoid closing
| tags.
| pkal wrote:
| This is probably not useful for most people, but I wrote a
| little script for Emacs that lets me write TeX-style math in
| a comment and then render/update it below in MathML:
| http://sdf.org/~pkal/src+etc/mathml-from-tex.el. The
| translation itself is done by LaTeXML, which one must install
| on your system separately.
| b1c837696ba28b wrote:
| I also had problems with MathML verbosity, and the culprit is
| the markup for the individual character classes (mi, mn, mo,
| ms.) I wrote a little filter that pulls apart character
| sequences and applies the respective character markup tags
| using a lookup table, so I can write MathML without using
| character markup. If any character markup is already present
| then it is skipped, so the automatic behavior can be bypassed
| by explicitly tagging characters and symbols as needed. This
| drastically reduces the character markup and makes it quite
| readable, even to my dyslexic eyes. As a bonus I'm not tied
| to some other tool that I have to game from time to time to
| get a particular MathML expression, I can say exactly what I
| want. BoBW.
| amoshebb wrote:
| Tinymist plugin in vscode is all you need to install, no giant
| amorphous TexLive thing needed for local editing.
| mcny wrote:
| Since there are typist folks here, how do you work with hash and
| dollar signs?
|
| If I want to write C# on my resume, I do C`#` but there has to be
| a better way?
| tcfhgj wrote:
| C\\#
| ithkuil wrote:
| I'm not a typst user but from a quick look at the language you
| should be able to type C\\#
|
| You can also write a macro
|
| #let csharp = [C\\#]
|
| And then use it as #csharp
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Or even `#show "csharp": [C\\#]` and then just write
| `csharp`. Though then you couldn't include the _actual_ text
| "csharp" in your document, should you wish to, so perhaps
| defining the variable is a better option.
| qmmmur wrote:
| I've changed all my teaching materials to Typst. It is such a
| breath of fresh air.
| oldie17 wrote:
| Typst is just wonderful, I hear maths majors now procrastinate on
| thesis writing by writing typst packages instead. Give it ten
| years and see how it developed.
|
| Pros:
|
| - Instant compile. It just sits there waiting, and once you save
| your .typ, boom, your .pdf is ready.
|
| - Surprisingly often I find myself using it as markdown
| replacement, e.g., for random meeting notes. Syntax is as easy as
| markdown and without boilerplate it produces a nice pdf.
|
| What's not to like?
|
| - IMO debugging can be tricky with quite concise error messages.
| And it does not produce any pdf once there is a single syntax
| error, precluding one favourite latex debugging route.
|
| - When using packages, one does encounter hickups, but no
| surprise here for long-time latex users.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| In my experience, the hiccups with packages are of a different
| kind than those with LaTeX packages. They're more often "normal
| programming" hiccups where a function is poorly-documented, or
| there's simply a bug. LaTeX packages can cause bigger problems:
| even usepackage-ing them can do arbitrary 'stuff' and have
| weird nonlocal effects that are basically undebuggable.
| Oftentimes two packages will just be _incompatible_ , which
| should not ever be the case in a sensible programming language.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| I must say I really like the more straightforward syntax,
| semantics, and distribution model of Typst. LaTeX is akin to
| programming with the C preprocessor, it's both ridiculous and
| amazing what people have done with it but it gets quickly
| intractable. However, I really do enjoy the quality of graphics,
| diagrammatic, and scientific output from LaTeX, even if typing
| them is a pain (LLMs are a huge help here).
|
| So asking the community here: what does Typst offer in place of
| PGF/TikZ[1], PGFPlots[2], Asymptote[3], chemfig[4], siunitx[5],
| physics2[6], and how does it work with existing bibliography
| providers? I use biber[7] with the Zotero Connector and Better
| BibTeX[8] so any paper I visit on the web is essentially
| instantly available to cite with one click on LaTeX.
|
| A good test for Typst ought to be reproducing most of these
| typographic and diagrammatic exemplars:
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/
|
| [1]: https://tikz.dev/
|
| [2]: https://tikz.dev/pgfplots/
|
| [3]: https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/
|
| [4]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/generic/chemfig/chemfig-
| en.p...
|
| [5]:
| https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/siunitx/siunit...
|
| [6]:
| https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/physics2/physi...
|
| [7]:
| https://mirrors.ctan.org/biblio/biber/base/documentation/bib...
|
| [8]: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/
| ioasuncvinvaer wrote:
| Cetz[0] is the drawing library in typst. For your other needs
| check out the package repository at [1] (visualization should
| be the correct category).
|
| Typst has a bibtex support by default [2].
|
| [0] https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz [1]
| https://typst.app/universe/search/?kind=packages&category=vi...
| [2] https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/bibliography/
| constantcrying wrote:
| Obviously the drawing capabilities aren't equivalent yet.
|
| bibtex files can be used in typst.
| euroderf wrote:
| Typst could be great for SSG blogging, but there doesn't seem to
| be much going on in that space.
| HiPhish wrote:
| I have written a couple of lecture notes in LaTeX and I wrote my
| master's thesis (mathematics) in LaTeX as well[1]. It's actually
| a fine language if all you want to do is write and rely on other
| people's templates. But actually writing my own package or
| understand how the underlying systems work has always seemed like
| black magic where individual packages have to avoid stepping on
| each other's toes, or add specific workarounds. Maybe I'm wrong,
| but that's the impression I got.
|
| It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that makes
| actually layout and designing the document approachable. I have
| only used it once for a quick one-off experiment and I did like
| the language, but as I have said above the language is not the
| problem if you just want to write text.
|
| [1] That's not quite true, actually. I first wrote my thesis in
| reStructuredText and used Pandoc to generate the LaTeX and
| subsequent PDF. This allowed me to get started without having to
| write a lengthy preamble first. Then after I had more than half
| of it written down and had a good idea of what I wanted the
| document to look like did I clean up the generated LaTeX, adjust
| the formatting to my needs, redid the drawing in TikZ, and then
| kept writing LaTeX from there. I still think the language is not
| the problem, but it's easy to get hung up in the design phase
| before even the first chapter is written.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > It would be nice if Typst could be a LaTeX replacement that
| makes actually layout and designing the document approachable
|
| Those goals fall way out of the scope of LaTeX (and of course
| of Typst). If you want to have more control and power into a
| document's design, there's ConTeXt - as a graphic designer I
| just love it and can't imagine myself replacing it with LaTeX
| or Typst.
|
| But as you said, if you want to concentrate on writing your
| text without thinking too much about its design, LaTeX or Typst
| are great for that.
| the-wumpus wrote:
| I disagree with it being outside the scope of typst. Typst
| makes designing a template entirely feasible, I've tried and
| succeeded.
| HiPhish wrote:
| I have hear of ConTeXt, but never tried it. I originally
| wanted to write my resume in LaTeX, but I quickly realized
| that my choice was either to use a template and have a resume
| that looks like everyone else's, or dig deeply into the
| arcane working of TeX. In the end I had my sister do it in
| InDesign, but now she is the only one who can update it. I
| would love to remake it in something I can actually edit
| myself, whether ConTeXt, Typst or Sile.
| tentahedronic wrote:
| I really think Context is the correct starting point if you
| want to make your own thing with the Tex quality. So many
| people frustrated that Latex makes it kinda hard to
| customize things and I was too. There is a learning curve
| to use the advanced features of Context but at least it
| feels like a sane system (and generally no need to add
| packages, the power to change the style of your document is
| fully granted to you).
| tossandthrow wrote:
| You footnote really describes why latex was not fine.
|
| I recently wrote a thesis in typst. I have written other thesis
| in latex.
|
| In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex.
|
| I don't need that for typst.
|
| If typst can avoid enshittifaction over the next years, then I
| will stay with them.
| eigenspace wrote:
| The nice thing about Typst is that I think they've built up a
| community and business model that _should_ disincentivize
| enshittification. The compiler is open source, and there 's a
| large number of people using it now. If they start
| enshittifying, it can just be forked and maintained by the
| community at the very least at the level of functionality
| it's currently at, which is good enough for a large segment
| of people.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| You can still write in markdown and use pandoc to create
| typst.
| isatty wrote:
| > In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to
| latex.
|
| Sure, but if you want to just _write_ then latex is just
| fine. I don't understand why you had to write in markdown?
| eigenspace wrote:
| I also haven't delved too deep into Typst, but I can say that
| in my experience, writing templates involves way less black
| magic than LaTeX. I feel like I'm already more proficient and
| making my own structures with it than with LaTeX despite using
| LaTeX for a decade
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I also have written. thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc
| to make a latex file and then latexmk to make a PDF file from
| it. I also used matplotlib and Python to make PDF plots, which
| I then could losslessly embed into the main document.
|
| Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with
| reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because
| you can use latex in your Pandoc template and reStructuredText
| is very powerful to begin with, compared to most if not all
| Markdown dialects for example. I think it might have been easy
| to continue writing reStructuredText, instead of latex.
| HiPhish wrote:
| > Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with
| reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because
| you can use latex in your Pandoc template and
| reStructuredText is very powerful to begin with, compared to
| most if not all Markdown dialects for example. I think it
| might have been easy to continue writing reStructuredText,
| instead of latex.
|
| Honestly I can't remember, it has been seven years since. I
| don't think I was aware that I could add LaTeX inside the
| reStructuredText, or maybe that wasn't a feature at that
| time. Or maybe the formulas were too complex to express in
| reSturedText (my topic was differential geometry). I think my
| main reason was that I did want control over the final layout
| and I wanted to add drawings in TikZ because that way the
| fonts in the image would match exactly the fonts in the text.
| aborsy wrote:
| Tex doesn't attract software developers. The programming language
| has remained really old fashioned and clunky. The error system is
| particularly bad. I use it on a daily basis, and it doesn't feel
| nice, far from the experience with Python or Rust.
|
| The output is superb though, which is why everyone in academia
| keep using it. It's just the tooling that is poor.
|
| I think it needs to be modernized.
| kzrdude wrote:
| TeX has the idea that it's feature complete and should not
| develop, so then by definition (cheekily) it cannot attract any
| developers.
| zzless wrote:
| With all due respect to your perspective on TeX, isn't it the
| whole point? There are weaknesses in TeX (like using $ for both
| beginning and ending the math mode) but they are quite minor.
| Quirkiness is not a weakness but being a standard (since 1986!)
| is a major strength. The fact that it does not change is a
| blessing, truly. Python may be a fine language with a great
| community of supporters and I use it because I pretty much must
| but programming in something that is essentially a moving
| target is no fun. And I would take TeX macros over Python ugly
| syntax any day, no offense. Not to say I am right just to point
| out that taste is not necessarily a reliable guide.
| sieve wrote:
| I have been planning to put out a quarterly Sanskrit newsletter
| for some time now, and was dreading having to deal with LaTeX.
| For basic stuff, LibreOffice PDF export works. But that is not a
| plain text workflow.
|
| I then discovered typst and it is a breath of fresh air.
| Unicode/Devanagari support out-of-the-box, no installing
| gigabytes of packages, near-instant compilation.
|
| My complements to those who got this done.
| malshe wrote:
| Where can we sign up for the newsletter?
| bawolff wrote:
| Fun fact: TeX was written closer in time to Alan Turing's famous
| paper introducing the Turing machine, than to present day.
|
| The absolute staying power of TeX has been incredible.
| wolfgangbabad wrote:
| Another unpronounceable project name. Well done.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Straight forward if you ask me:
|
| > /taIpst/. "Ty" like in Typesetting and "pst" like in Hipster.
|
| https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#pronunciat...
| notpushkin wrote:
| Huh, I was reading it as "typist" all this time (and will
| probably continue).
| flokl wrote:
| I noticed quite a few people must do that because I have
| heard that pronunciation a few times already IRL and in
| videos. Some people also write it that way, a search here
| in the comments results in 4 matches.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| I keep reading it as tupst.
| bartvk wrote:
| I agree but I'm thankful that it's a very searchable but still
| related name at least.
| northlondoner wrote:
| Typst is a markdown plug-in. It is a productivity tool. It lacks
| the standalone nature of LaTeX as a language and proper
| extensibility.
| MatejKafka wrote:
| Huh? Other than borowing some of the syntax, Typst is
| completely unrelated to markdown.
| constantcrying wrote:
| How does a project with a built in package manger and a wide
| variety of packages lack "proper" extensibility?
| jakegmaths wrote:
| Almost all my computer science students are using Typst on my
| recommendation to write up their programming projects, vs most
| using Microsoft Word last year. Specifically, writing in VSCode
| with the Tinymist Typist extension. All going very well so far
| and no complaints.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I was with you when you explained how you got them off of MS
| Word (even worse if it was the web version!!), until you
| brought up VSCode. I get it, you are probably advocating very
| practical choices. Just that I wouldn't recommend students to
| become dependent on VSCode (due to its vendor and "telemetry").
| Basically, that makes the students again dependent on MS. But I
| guess since you recommend an extension, you cannot recommend
| VSCodium and adding the extension store as someone in a
| teaching position? If you can, then I would strongly advocate
| recommending VSCodium instead (or non-electron app editors), to
| avoid spyware on their machines and to promote a healthier
| tooling.
| HiPhish wrote:
| There is a language server for Typst:
| https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/tinymist
|
| I have not tried this one, but the predecessor (typst-lsp)
| was working fine with Neovim for me when I did my little
| Typst experiment last year. Whatever the VSCode plugin is
| offering should be possible to replicate on top of tinymist.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Tinymist is working very well with Neovim too - and there
| is a preview plugin based off of tinymist, too, for Neovim.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| I guess if Pandoc adds Typst output support I will consider using
| that, but "LaTeX replacement" sounds like something that is too
| low level to consider for most usecases? It was many years since
| I used LaTeX for anything other than at most short snippets
| embedded in other documents (e.g. md or org). Or would Typst
| replace something like Pandoc Markdown (with a long list of
| supported output formats and a convenient Lua filter API)?
|
| * Submitted too fast. A quick search tells me Pandoc already
| added Typst input and output support (e.g.
| https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output.html), so guess I need
| to look into if I should switch to use that for generating PDFs.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Depends what you want to do, but Typst has replaced Pandoc for
| the book [1] I'm writing.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/scalawithcats/scala-with-
| cats/tree/featur...
| cbolton wrote:
| I moved from Pandoc+Lua filters to Typst. Having the scripting
| language integrated is just nicer, though I sometimes miss the
| separation between data (from Pandoc markdown) and code.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| Is it as good for generating EPUB or HTML for instance? Or
| just plain text?
| cbolton wrote:
| I use it to generate PDF. The last release introduced
| experimental HTML output which is promising but still
| immature. Work on EPUB support hasn't started as far as I
| know but it's on the roadmap, and I guess it will be
| relatively easy once the ongoing work on HTML and
| accessibility is done.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| Sounds like it may eventually turn into an interesting
| replacement for Pandoc then, but I will stick to the
| latter for now.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| I've ditched Pandoc + Latex for Typst for a book [1] that I'm
| writing. Typst is as easy to write a Markdown, and so much easier
| to program than Latex (though it is still a bit rough in some
| places). In Latex I would have to rely on a slew of packages to
| get anything done, and then work around their quirky
| interactions. With Typst it's feasible to just write it myself.
| It's also really fast and doesn't poo all over the file system.
| Strong recommend if you're producing technical documentation with
| PDF as your primary target.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/scalawithcats/scala-with-
| cats/tree/featur...
| donperignon wrote:
| No criticism, but just reading the title my brain said, rust,
| and... voila! Apart from that, neat project.
| enricozb wrote:
| Typst is great for web content as well (even though their HTML
| export functionality is still experimental). I've written blog
| posts on interaction nets in Typst [0] and I really like how the
| diagrams look.
|
| [0]:
| https://ezb.io/thoughts/interaction_nets/lambda_calculus/202...
| erk__ wrote:
| I rewrote my website to use typst for all the content and I
| really like how it is to integrate as well, its just a rust
| crate that I use in my build script because Typst is just on
| crates.io
|
| https://erk.dev/2025/04/19/bureaucracy
| robert-zaremba wrote:
| TBH, I'm sick about LaTeX: - compilation is heavy - it's not
| friendly for writing (far from the dominant markup languages) -
| poor support to HTML / Epub / mobile outputs - output (PDF) not
| friendly for parsing / digesting. - tonnes of templates, lot of
| mess.
|
| We should just use human friendly markups like MyST Markdown [1]
| or Org Mode [2].
|
| Unfortunately, whitepapers are predominantly written in LaTeX.
| Thankfully, arXiv recently made a move to parse and render those
| documents in the web format. It's a hard job. But this is the
| wrong way around: instead of keep composing documents in LaTeX
| (which is not human friendly), and then doing the hard job with
| tooling, we should start with human first approach and have win-
| win!
|
| We are living in the world where web content is the primary
| content and friendly for desktop, mobile devices and readers and
| tools (select, copy, edit...). It's easy to package any web
| content into epub and ship it in a single file. Printing is also
| easy. Only cons: precise typesetting is not harder. But this is
| less of the problem. I would prefer a content that is friendly to
| read and is responsive, than a precise typesetting.
|
| [1] https://mystmd.org/ [2]
| https://orgmode.org/manual/Summary.html [3]
| https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html
| lupire wrote:
| MyST seems nice but it appears to be not a replacement for
| LaTeX, but is a way to embed LaTeX in non-LaTeX content
| constantcrying wrote:
| Typst wants to target both PDF and HTML, making it trivial to
| have a PDF document and a HTML page with identical content.
|
| That way you get the best out of both worlds.
| Syzygies wrote:
| Wants to, but still experimental:
|
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/
| anta40 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure LaTeX can do all the documents I _want_ to, e.g
| anything with complicated math expressions, various
| pseudocodes, computer science-y diagrams like karnaugh map,
| algorithm flowchart etc etc.
|
| Of course, it's not all roses and sunshines, though. Depending
| on your usecases, usually need to import a few packages and
| sometimes they don't work out of the box easily.
|
| For real life work I don't need that much power, though. But
| after learning various alternatives like markdown, asciidoctor
| etc etc eventually I go back to LaTeX. Oh well :p
| pepa65 wrote:
| Weasyprint transforms html into pdf.
| khalic wrote:
| I just gotta ask: what's this trend of tech blogs to appear like
| 90s html? No typographical rules whatsoever, basic colours with
| outrageous contrasts.
|
| Does it make the blogs look more edgy and geeky? Is it a an
| artistic trend in web design?
|
| I'd love some insights from someone with a better sense of the
| situation
| tcfhgj wrote:
| according to Wikipedia, the blog was launched January 29, 1998
| topaz0 wrote:
| LWN is one of the most important journalistic outfits of the
| open source software world, not just some guy's blog. As the
| other commenter noted, it also dates to the '90s.
| nyc1983 wrote:
| Nobody seems to be taking about how great typst is to use
| programmatically. It's absolutely trivial for example to build a
| Lambda function that parses some json input into a PDF. We're
| using it to generate PDF invoices for our customers. We save
| massive amounts of compute because of how fast typst compiles
| into the PDF.
| kolibril13 wrote:
| if you want create animations with typst, I've written a blender
| extension for rendering typst content:
| https://github.com/kolibril13/blender_typst_importer
| einpoklum wrote:
| Typst seems to be the product of a commercial company - fully
| controlled by it. That's not appropriate as a foundation for
| document authoring by "the public".
|
| I am also worried about the rust-centricity, seeing how rust is
| somewhat of a moving target.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| What do you mean the rust-centricity?
| tialaramex wrote:
| Some people have this weird idea that because Rust ships new
| versions very often (every six weeks, like a web browser)
| this means it's unstable. They see rust 1.90 and they're like
| "Oh no, that's dozens of incompatible versions" rather than
| "Wow, over ten years of commitment to compatibility".
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| It's under Apache license, and therefore it can be taken
| closed-source at any moment.
|
| Rust is a language for virtue-signalling, rather than for doing
| useful work.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean when you say it can be taken
| closed-source at any moment?
|
| Do you mean that future iterations of the software could be
| closed source?
|
| As far as I understand, they can't just revoke the existing
| open source license for the existing already distributed
| software, and if they did decide to move forward from here
| with closed source distribution, the community would be free
| to just fork the existing codebase and continue working on
| it.
| throawayonthe wrote:
| how? as a copyright holder you can at any time relicense code
| as proprietary of course, but that neither revokes the
| existing licensed code, nor is at all unique to the apache
| license?
| mr-karan wrote:
| It's great to see Typst getting more visibility. We migrated a
| real-world workload to it a couple of years back: generating and
| e-mailing 1.5M+ PDFs daily at my org, Zerodha.
|
| Our previous pipeline was LaTeX-based (first pdflatex, then
| lualatex), but we were constantly fighting cryptic memory errors
| on large documents and huge Docker image sizes that slowed down
| boot times of our ephemeral workers.
|
| Switching to Typst was a massive win for us. The single static
| binary resulted in tiny images and faster boot times. More
| importantly, the performance gains were huge. Overall compile
| times were ~3-4x faster than LaTeX. On really large documents
| (2000+ pages, mostly tables), Typst compiles in ~1 minute vs. ~18
| minutes with lualatex.
|
| Beyond performance, the better developer experience and good
| error messages was a nice bonus too.
|
| We wrote a detailed post about the entire architecture - from the
| job orchestration with Nomad to the S3 optimizations and the
| Typst migration in particular. If you're curious, you can read it
| here: https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes
| lupire wrote:
| For your use case, why were you using LaTeX in the first place?
| That is more surprising than finding a replacement for LaTeX.
| xigoi wrote:
| What else would you use to generate PDFs from a text-based
| template?
| jayknight wrote:
| 20-ish years ago I wrote a system to do that with xslt.
| Would not recommend.
| sixtyj wrote:
| E.g. Pandoc, universal tool...
| xigoi wrote:
| Doesn't Pandoc just use LaTeX under the hood?
| dfc wrote:
| You will be surprised to learn that pandoc uses latex for
| generating the PDF. It's barely hidden:
|
| https://www.pandoc.org/demo/example33/2.4-creating-a-
| pdf.htm...
| sixtyj wrote:
| I know it ;) But we are talking about how to use
| something universal. I like pandoc as it is easy to use
| and... boring.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Pandoc works with typst too.
| smartmic wrote:
| DITA, see my other comment on level up.
| spider-mario wrote:
| ReportLab?
| chromanoid wrote:
| A good XSL-FO impl with docbook or something like that?
| henrebotha wrote:
| Asciidoctor?
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Docbook
| pepa65 wrote:
| Apart from typst, I've used weasyprint.
| Etheryte wrote:
| If you're compiling millions of documents, many with
| thousands of pages, you probably need something very
| universal. LaTeX is boring tech, off the shelf, ready to use.
| It might take some work to figure out the initial setup with
| regards to templating and everything else, but after that,
| you can be generally pretty content that it will handle most
| things you throw at it just fine.
| constantcrying wrote:
| LaTeX is notoriously bad at being boring tech. It has a lot
| of very rough edges, especially when it comes to longer
| documents.
| ab5tract wrote:
| And yet this very post positions Typst as a potential
| alternative to LaTeX. In other words, LaTeX is still in
| the top position.
|
| Personally I think ConTeXt is a far superior tool, though
| its documentation is always trailing quite a distance
| behind its current capabilities.
| sixtyj wrote:
| I'd suggest LaTeX because of its strengths with tables,
| mathematical notation, and similar content.
|
| LaTeX notation works well for this and can be easily
| converted to both web and PDF formats.
|
| But compilation speed definitely needs improvement.
|
| On the other hand, how often do you actually need to compile
| thousands of pages into a single document? That's really an
| edge case.
| smartmic wrote:
| I am currently preparing to switch to DITA. The learning
| curve is steeper at the beginning, but I find the overall
| concept of topic-oriented, information-typed authoring with
| content reuse very attractive.
|
| Some people might say that writing in XML is annoying, but it
| isn't if you have a decent XML editor. In my case, it is
| Emacs nXML mode. Customisation is possible with DITA-OT [1]
| and plugins, and yes, it is also based on XSLT. Overall, I
| think DITA is an industry-proven XML powerhouse. It may be
| boring, but it has huge potential for anyone with advanced
| documentation requirements.
|
| [0] https://dita-lang.org/dita/archspec/base/introduction-to-
| dit...
|
| [1] https://www.dita-ot.org/
| Archelaos wrote:
| I am using a LaTeX pipeline for creating text, invoices, forms,
| etc. from snippets stored in a database. It was quite
| complicated to set up, but the results are very satisfying. In
| principle, I would like an easier markup language, but am
| afraid to wast my time trying out something new, just to run
| into limitations after awhile.
|
| Here are my most important requirements: Multiple columns
| configurable for meaningful column and page breaks (minimum
| number of lines in a new column or page). Reliable automatic
| hyphenation for multiple languages (at least English and
| German, perhaps French, Italian and Spanish in the future).
| Pictures in columns with dynamic placing according to the
| available space. Complex tables and forms with sensible
| automatic page breaks. Background images. Different areas on
| the page which are treated like mini-pages. -- Is Typst capable
| of all that?
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I haven't done pictures in columns but the rest should be
| doable.
|
| I've migrated my invoicing (and all my other
| publishing/slides) to typst from latex and couldn't be more
| happy.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Now, this isn't really an alternative, but I can recommend
| using _pandoc_ instead of pure LaTex. Personally, I think
| text blocks are much easier to handle and read in markdown
| and pandoc allows you to use in-line LaTex wherever markdown
| is insufficient, without making basic text styling
| unnecessarily verbose. In my opinion, the result is a better
| /friendlier LaTex, or limitless markdown respectively.
| Especially for writing papers and such, you can always start
| actually writing in basic markdown, which is trivial and
| almost-WYSIWYG, and later worry about presentation. In my
| experience, with pure LaTex you easily get lost in sidequests
| and it's much harder to get into a writing flow and find your
| way around your own words in the editor.
| henrebotha wrote:
| If you're going to do this, might as well go with AsciiDoc
| instead. It's vastly superior as a syntax. Markdown breaks
| down at the mere mention of something as trivial as a
| nested list item containing a table of blockquotes.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Not that it couldn't be trivial in the abstract, but I'm
| struggling to imagine a use for a nested list item
| containing a table of blockquotes. It doesn't seem at all
| surprising that a tool wouldn't anticipate that.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I've worked places that will regularly send generated PDFs of
| things like statistics or small reports or other generic boring
| business stuff every week or month.
|
| It's always been some combination of MJML, inline DIY HTML, or
| PDFs generated with Puppeteer etc.
|
| Do you think Typst would be a good fit there too?
| kumarvvr wrote:
| It has a paid version, which frightens me that future greatness
| of the software and eco-system may be over-shadowed by greed and
| control.
|
| Only paid version has "private packages".
| tcfhgj wrote:
| *paid version of an editor
| pydry wrote:
| The _lack_ of this would frighten me that it would be
| neglected.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| The free _online_ version doesn 't have private packages. You
| are, of course, free to run the compiler locally with as many
| private packages as your heart desires.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I've started using typst for small local documents that I would
| previously have written in markdown (or R-markdown). Typst offers
| programming features that are very helpful for small writing
| tasks that need more customization than markdown provides but
| that don't need the wildly expansive set of templates available
| in the latex world.
|
| Like other academics, I plan to stick with latex for journal
| articles and books, unless publishers provide support for typst.
|
| Markdown still has a place for files on github, because that
| means that web browsers will display formatted material, not just
| the raw code. A similar thing applies to code documentation, with
| many systems (R, Julia, etc) supporting various flavours of
| markdown.
|
| I recommend typst to students for small tasks like assignments.
| It offers more typesetting power than markdown, it's a great
| replacement for msword, and it's easier to learn than latex.
|
| Long story short, typst fills a niche. But it's not the be-all
| and end-all, at least in my (natural science) field.
| bjackman wrote:
| > Like other academics, I plan to stick with latex for journal
| articles and books, unless publishers provide support for
| typst.
|
| In my undergrad we sent all our essays etc as LaTeX and it was
| honestly very usable. I assume this was somewhat dependent on
| having a wealth of enthusiast professors and postgrads to
| develop the templates though...?
|
| Since then, I've used LaTeX in a "freeform" way and absolutely
| hated it, I will definitely be trying Typst next time I need
| more than Markdown/RST.
|
| But I can imagine that if you are unlucky, working with the
| journal-provided templates could be WORSE - if the templates
| suck you are surely in a world of pain!
| bombcar wrote:
| LaTeX absolutely shines when you have someone providing a
| template; hardly anything comes close.
|
| When you're on your own, you need to either steal someone
| else's and modify it, learn to build your own, or just use
| something like the Memoir package (which is the first but
| designed for it.)
|
| Even if you don't use LaTeX at all, "A Few Notes on Book
| Design" is worth the read: https://ctan.org/pkg/memdesign
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Elements of Typographic Style is also a good one if you
| want to geek out.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I've never seen a publisher's template that was hard to work
| with.
|
| The process of writing in latex for journals (and textbooks
| -- I've written for both things) is really very easy.
| Publishers almost always provide a sample .tex file that has
| items you just fill in. For example, there will be something
| like `\authorNames{}` and you just put the names between the
| braces. The same goes for titles, equations, figures, etc.
| There will be sample paragraphs as well. And they will have
| examples of various citations styles, too.
|
| Speaking of citations, latex has good support for citation
| databases. (Typst and markdown also provide this support.)
|
| I'd say most people I know write their early drafts in latex.
| They have a target journal in mind from the start of the
| writing process, so they just grab the latest sample file and
| stylesheet(s) from the publisher's website and start entering
| text.
|
| As you say, using latex for freeform documents is a different
| matter. That's where I've started to use typst. And I do
| recommend it for such things. You may find yourself wanting
| to make some typst templates for common tasks (meeting notes,
| position papers, etc.) but it's not terrible hard to make
| such templates. I've made a few, but often I don't bother --
| I just put a few lines of customization at the start, if I
| want to alter how section headings look, or I want a
| different font from the default one.
| lupire wrote:
| I imagine that it would be productive to write a draft of a
| paper or book in Typist, and then do the painful LaTeX writing
| for the later and final drafts. The pain saved on early drafts
| would outweigh the cost of doing some work twice.
| fhcbix wrote:
| For me Tectonic[1] solved many of the issues I had with LaTeX, so
| that's what I'd recommend if you still depend on LaTeX as a
| language. Make sure to use the V2 CLI (`tectonic -X`) which comes
| with convenient features like watch mode. With vim and evince (or
| any PDF viewer that auto refreshes) open I get a similar real-
| time experience to popular online editors like Overleaf, but in
| the comfort of my own editor.
|
| [1] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I've been using Typst to create some good-looking agendas for my
| Toastmasters club. [1] I've found it a lot of fun, and have
| received a fair few compliments.
|
| [1]: https://typst.app/project/rmyyeU17y51rl6ISSqGji9
| throawayonthe wrote:
| Writing a 3d renderer in Typst because
| https://youtu.be/ocsR-o7auak
| robin_reala wrote:
| I've used neither Latex or Typst, but how are they at producing
| accessible PDFs?
| nicce wrote:
| They aren't fully compatible yet but there is a lot of work
| going on now because of the new EU legistlation. LaTeX is
| closer.
|
| E.g
|
| https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/133
|
| https://www.latex-project.org/news/2024/03/27/PDFUA2-example...
|
| https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/
| flokl wrote:
| Typst will support PDF/UA-1 with the upcoming version 0.14.
| Pull with the current progress:
| https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6619
| reknih wrote:
| We're pretty close, actually. The PRs for accessible PDFs [^1]
| and their associated documentation [^2] are landing next week.
|
| [^1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6619
|
| [^2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6905
| cyp0633 wrote:
| I loved typesetting my bachelor thesis with Typst (but with LaTeX
| math formula), and now it's even more promising after being able
| to embed PDF figures this July (see issue #145).
| constantcrying wrote:
| Typst fixes pretty much every problem LaTeX has.
|
| It replaces the macro language of LaTeX with a python/rust like
| language, which couldn't be easier to write.
|
| The markup language has a markdown like syntax which makes
| writing simple things simple. And allows for complex, but easy to
| comprehend operations when useful.
|
| It has good tooling, with helpful error messages and is not
| arbitrarily limited on memory or font support. (I know some LaTeX
| engines do not have that problem anymore, but even the Idea of
| competing engines with different feature sets is somewhat
| ridiculous)
|
| I have used it a lot, for many different things.
| raybb wrote:
| I also recently published a book written with Typst. It was
| absolutely a joy to work with, especially because the book was a
| collection of student essays. I converted them from docx to Typst
| and then getting all the figures and tables setup nicely and
| uniformly was easy. The PDF generation was perfect but converting
| to docx/epub I ran into a few bugs in pandoc. I reported them and
| a few were fixed and a few are still open. Overall, a very
| positive experience.
|
| Book: https://thelabofthought.co/shop/p/nbmi3
|
| Bugs:
| https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3A...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| As a long time latex user, and one who is occasionally frustrated
| by usual things about latex, I have two qualms about attempting
| to switch to a new system. The first is I already have found
| solutions to many of my edge cases in latex. Will I have to do
| this all over again in something like Typst? It can't be so good
| as to not have any. And when I do encounter them, is the user
| base big enough to have already encountered it and solved it and
| wrote about it, so I can just look it up?
|
| Looking at the example in the link, in principle it looks great.
| But one of the strengths of latex is that I can customize things.
| Like for the list example, I can have fine tune control over the
| indent on both sides, the list marker symbol, the space between
| the marker and the text, and so on and so on. Does typst have
| this level of control?
| vessenes wrote:
| Same boat here. It's a very good layout language. And vastly
| superior production process. Will you find new edge cases? Yes.
| Is there a large user base covering all problems? No.
|
| You can add: "Does Claude Code understand it well enough?" No
| as of a year ago, last time I checked.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Yesterday I had Claude write me a simple 3d renderer using
| the CetZ package (typst's Tikz) to draw illustrations of
| surfaces for a math paper. It pretty much nailed it.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I've had decent results from AI for typst.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Control for indentation, spacing and symbol is available:
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/list/
| foobarian wrote:
| I guess to add to that, what if there is another party involved
| with your work that will demand latex? Like a library or
| journal publishing your thesis/paper?
| philistine wrote:
| Typst still does not natively support floating images. You can
| put images at the top of a page, or at the bottom, but there is
| no native way to declare an image as floating with text
| wrapping around it.
| SabrinaJewson wrote:
| "Natively" is important here because it's actually relatively
| easy to get it working with a package:
| https://github.com/ntjess/wrap-it
| flokl wrote:
| or meander, a recently released, more powerful package
| https://typst.app/universe/package/meander
| agnishom wrote:
| The experience of editing Typst on VSCode (with appropriate
| plugins) is great. The text is updated real time, and there is no
| full-page refresh
| jbaber wrote:
| It's my duty bring up that plain TeX, the Knuth language in which
| the large macro collection LaTeX is written, isn't as verbose and
| opaque as LaTeX when people complain about that.
|
| It has the opposite problem where you may have more control than
| you'd like. But it is in some sense very simple. e.g. this is a
| valid plain TeX document:
|
| $$\aleph_0$$
|
| \bye
|
| Things don't have to begin{ and end{ etc.
|
| There are simple collections of useful macros like [extended
| plain] kind of like lodash where the aim is to enhance the
| classic syntax by ` input eplain` at the top, not take over.
|
| NB: I was so proud to write my thesis entirely in [extended
| plain], but when it was time to submit it to the library they
| basically said, "That's nice, nerd, but we have specific style
| files." and I had to rewrite it into LaTeX anyway!
|
| [extended plain]: https://tug.org/eplain/
| bombcar wrote:
| Anyone who has only ever used LaTeX will be pleasantly
| surprised by plain TeX - so many of the things that you'd think
| must be LaTeX macros are actually just TeX itself.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Knuth's _The TeXbook_ is also a delightful read. You 'll
| learn a lot about typography.
| impendia wrote:
| One advantage of LaTeX is that it's virtually impossible to
| generate markup by accident. This contrasts with other platforms
| which often decide that I'm trying to create a bulleted list,
| write something in boldface, etc. -- which hasn't always been the
| case.
|
| It seems that part of the design philosophy of Typst is to make
| more assumptions about what the user is trying to do. For
| example, apparently if the user wants "dif" to appear in a math
| formula, typing "dif" would instead produce a differential --
| although I presume there is some easy way to handle this.
|
| Anyone who has used Typst -- did this potential disadvantage
| materialize in any way which was at all significant? Or did it
| turn out to be a nonissue?
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Text needs quotes in math mode, only single letters are
| rendered as text.
|
| Markup is indicated by [].
|
| Math by $$
|
| Code by #
|
| Accidentally entering markup mode hasn't happened to me so far.
| airstrike wrote:
| This is a nonissue. I've written several lengthy documents
| mixing up all sorts of pieces in Typst over a year, created my
| own template, modules, functions...
| moltar wrote:
| I love Typst and have standardized all our company docs on that.
| Much easier to render neat looking docs. And coding agents are
| quite capable at making edits.
| amai wrote:
| If Typst would also allow to create HTML it could become a
| successor of LaTeX. Without it it is just another kind of LaTeX,
| created for printing stuff on paper. But that is not what a
| digital future needs.
| echoangle wrote:
| Theres experimental support for HTML export:
|
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/html/
| commandersaki wrote:
| I tried this out about 6 or so months ago; it was pretty bad
| unfortunately. I was willing to put my money where my mouth
| is and pay a bit to dedicate resources for it like a bounty,
| but typst organisation doesn't seem to have something like
| that. I have actually donated to the project AND paid for a
| subscription to their web service though.
| colelyman wrote:
| I love Typst! Currently rewriting my CV in Typst and it has been
| an excellent experience. One small hindrance is the inability to
| have multiple bibliographies.
|
| In the past I have also used it to generates quotes (in terms of
| finances, invoice etc.). It was neat because all of the logic for
| adding up the subtotal was written in the language (and was
| fairly easy to understand). I can imagine trying to do that logic
| in LaTeX...
| qbit42 wrote:
| Typst seems like an improvement in many respects, but I
| definitely prefer LaTeX when working with detailed math equations
| (most of my use of LaTeX). I think there is a lot of inertia for
| anything to replace LaTeX for mathematical research.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| [deleted]
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Typst is entirely open-source as well. Only the online
| overleaf-like system is proprietary.
|
| > Compilation is faster, but so much more time is spent writing
| than typesetting.
|
| Continuing in your vein of writing dismissive comments, the
| moment you actually start caring about how things look in your
| documents (you know, the reason why people use LaTeX),
| typesetting starts taking up a non-trivial amount of time. Not
| in the act of setting up the typesetting, but actually
| debugging it.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I do care how my things look, I've written books, papers,
| reports, CVs, slides and posters (the last two was admittedly
| painful). I think I reacted to a very dismissive tone towards
| LaTeX from typst fanboys who cannot imagine why someone would
| still use LaTeX, but thinking about it - I don't like the
| tone of my message either so I'll delete it.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| It's night and day.
|
| I'm a PhD student currently writing my thesis in Typst. On paper
| this is an absurdly risky decision: it's a new technology without
| a huge user-base, it's not totally stable yet, etc. But I tried
| Typst and I had no choice. It was obviously the right thing to
| do, even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone
| of my university's LaTeX template.
|
| I've been using LaTeX for over ten years and I still wouldn't say
| that I "know" TeX in any meaningful way. I was not only
| productive but proficient in Typst in a day or two. If there
| isn't a package for something that I need (and, surprisingly
| often, there _are_ packages for what I need, and excellent
| ones!), I find that I can just do it myself. Quickly. Things that
| never would have been possible for me with LaTeX are within easy
| reach. In ways I 'd be happy to talk about if anyone's curious,
| it's been a huge enabler of my productivity as a researcher. I
| owe this tool so much.
|
| Interestingly, I spend far, far less time yak-shaving in Typst
| than in TeX, since I can just Do The Thing That I Want. I'm
| actually focusing on writing instead of figuring out why package
| A conflicts with package B, and then how to install a different
| version of just a single package to override one of them, and
| then... [this sort of thing doesn't/can't happen in Typst; it's a
| real programming language with real modules] I could go on and on
| about the (relative) quality of the ergonomics and devex: fast
| compilation times, as others have said, but so much more than
| that. Try it out. Just try it out.
|
| I should also say that it's not perfect. There are some funky
| design decisions for sure. There are some missing features, like
| including pdfs as images in your document (that one's on its way,
| I believe). Critically, the quality of the typesetting is
| maybe... 95% as good as TeX, which is perfect every time.
| Sometimes things don't kern quite right, and you have to adjust
| them by hand. It's a work in progress. I'm optimistic that it
| will achieve parity on that front.
| Rochus wrote:
| > _I 've been using LaTeX for over ten years and I still
| wouldn't say that I "know" TeX in any meaningful way. I was not
| only productive but proficient in Typst in a day or two._
|
| That's an interesting insight. Do you have an idea why this is?
| Do you have a CS background?
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Yep, I'm a CS researcher in a top-3 department. (Hate to be
| all credentialist like that, but I'm guessing it does mean
| something to this audience.)
|
| I think a lot of the reason is that, ok, LaTeX is extremely
| complicated. We all know this. Its partisans tend to believe
| that this is because typesetting is a hard problem.
| Typesetting _is_ a hard problem! We know this, too. But I
| think that a substantial fraction of the complexity of LaTeX
| is accidental complexity stemming, ultimately, from the
| inherently loosey-goosey nature of the system.
|
| See, there is no real abstraction in TeX. There are no real
| mechanisms for encapsulation/information hiding/whatever.
| It's all just characters that eat characters and turn into
| other characters. Anything can do anything. Anything can be
| anything. As a result, the whole "theory" of what a TeX
| program "is" (like in the sense that Peter Naur used that
| word?) is _conventional_.
|
| This means that _even to reuse other people 's code_, you
| have to imbibe decades of convention that's maybe semi-
| documented, maybe folkloric, or maybe perfectly sound but
| requires you to read a 230-page manual. I can only speak for
| myself, but for me, it's no way to live.
|
| Now, again, TeX-lovers tend to claim that its high degree of
| loosey-gooseyness is necessary, that it's what makes TeX
| "powerful." I don't know, that sounds to me like the same old
| "you can't _handle_ writing assembly " story. Sure I can. I'd
| just rather not if I can help it.
|
| Maybe it's the PL person in me.
| jfengel wrote:
| TeX had many design goals. "Being a good programming
| language" was not one of them.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Indeed! It undeniably succeeded at setting the standard
| for typesetting quality. Big ups to Don K.
| analog31 wrote:
| It also brought typesetting to academic research, which
| means it's doing something that wasn't necessary before
| it arrived.
|
| I was one of the last holdouts from a bygone era. I
| finished my dissertation in physics, in 1993. It's
| neither typeset, nor even in a computer readable form.
| Some fellow students were already using LaTeX by that
| point (mostly high energy physics, the slowest to
| graduate of the physics specialties) but I wasn't going
| to change my already obsolete tech stack within mere
| months of finishing.
|
| I also have my parents' chemistry theses. They took
| handwritten manuscripts to a typist who banged out 4
| copies at once using carbon paper. And then they entered
| their equations and figures by hand. (My thesis is hand
| corrected too). And their theses were _short_.
|
| LaTeX did a lot of things for my fellow students, but it
| didn't make them finish quicker.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| You wrote an analog thesis about 31 years ago, analog31?
| You've been playing the long game with this account!
|
| Appreciate the story, thanks for sharing. Can I ask what
| your thesis was on (in whatever way isn't too personally-
| identifying if that's a concern)?
| analog31 wrote:
| I anticipated this moment. ;-)
|
| It was at a time of extremely rapid development of laser
| technology, where you built your own lasers to be at the
| cutting edge, which meant optics, electronics, and in my
| case, computer control plus data collection. I developed
| a method of increasing the signal-to-noise for a class of
| spectroscopy measurements by a factor of roughly 1000.
| This opened up a number of possible experiments involving
| otherwise weak effects.
|
| My experiment produced some token physics results, but
| the method that I developed was really the point of it. A
| couple other labs used my setup, substituting more modern
| lasers as they became available. Meanwhile, I went into
| industry, and still work on measurement instrumentation
| today.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Good stuff, nothing but respect for that kind of work.
| AMO people are a different breed. Spending all day
| interpreting power spectral densities and tracking down
| ground loops takes a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Literally.
| Last time I used a microwave amplifier I plugged it in
| with the wrong polarity and blew it up!
| analog31 wrote:
| It probably required negative power for some unexpected
| reason.
|
| CMOS has spoiled us.
| Rochus wrote:
| Or could it be that the fact that LaTeX is a layer on top
| of TeX is a cause of additional complexity and that you
| still have to deal with TeX, so the abstraction is neither
| complete nor opaque? I assume in Typst they don't (yet)
| have this issue. Another reason could be missing static
| typing and thus less formal means to find bugs? You
| "missing abstractions" finding would point to that.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Yeah, absolutely, the sheer number of moving parts is
| related to this. There's TeX-the-language, there's LaTeX-
| the-format (a big layer of macros and conventions), the
| different LaTeX standards (LaTeX2e, LaTeX3, whatever, I
| don't know the ins and outs). Then there's the
| implementation: all the different engines (pdftex, XeTeX,
| LuaTex), then there are the _distributions_ , then there
| are build systems and wrapper scripts to handle all the
| mysterious compilation-cycle incantations that depend on
| all the other stuff (latexmk, etc.).
|
| All these layers and alternatives have proliferated
| partly because of age and the necessity of new solutions
| to new problems. I also think they're partly _coping_
| with fundamental limitations, design decisions that
| seemed like (or very much were!) a good idea in 1978,
| that sort of thing.
| ok123456 wrote:
| And the TeX that we know is the "new" TeX, which was
| created after Knuth completely rewrote the "old" TeX in
| 1983.
| fergie wrote:
| > top-3 departement
|
| I'm curious- what does this mean?
| analog31 wrote:
| It narrows things down to about 20 departments. ;-)
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| :)
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Ugh, unfortunately it means "please note that I'm not an
| unserious person." Very often when you have opinions on
| software on the internet, trolls will jump out of the
| hedgerow and shout, "who are _you_ to have an opinion? "
| And, sadly, that same sort of person will often be
| mollified somewhat by prestige.
|
| Feels kind of icky to have written that, though, and
| maybe I regret it slightly.
| ok123456 wrote:
| It also belies an ignorance that some schools have
| specializations. Utah wouldn't come to mind as a "top-20"
| school by the snobs, but they basically created computer
| graphics.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Fellow PL grad student--not a top-3 tho ;)
|
| I've looked at Typst and it looks attractive. I'm not quite
| willing to invest in it until, say, PACMPL lets me use it
| there. Any idea if that will happen any time soon?
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| I wouldn't count on it!
|
| For me, it's been invaluable for notes and memos (and my
| thesis). When it comes time to submit a paper, I
| transcribe everything to LaTeX. It's a pain, but it's a
| lesser pain than transcribing from handwritten notes
| scattered across three notebooks and several crumpled-up
| sheets of printer paper in the bottom of my bag. That's
| my own peculiarity; YMMV.
|
| (Edit: also, ugh, I feel like such a goof for having
| written that. Thanks for being nice about it.)
| fredguth wrote:
| I totally agree. I have written in LaTeX extensively and
| Typst is a game changer and a life saver. The community is
| also a plus. I love it and I will never go back to TeX.
| ajkjk wrote:
| Isn't that everyone's experience? TeX is a nightmare. It
| predates all standards for sensible software.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I used to use LaTeX pretty frequently and although I was
| reasonably productive I also never felt that I "knew" it. It
| was a whole lot of googling "how to do x in latex" and
| pasting in something that was too arcane for me to remember
| for next time (and/or copy pasting from my own prior
| documents)
|
| In all honesty, I only ever did it to achieve the "LaTeX
| look". These days I write in markdown or (gasp) wysiwyg
| editors like google docs.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Thanks to pervasive use of LLMs I predict the future is
| mostly markdown. It's the defacto output format for every
| LLM. It's simple, plaintext and easy to version control.
|
| Hell I wish I could submit my resume as markdown.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS
| background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis
| in LaTeX. I have done many detailed figures in TikZ and done
| countless presentations using Beamer.
|
| I have no idea how to implement anything in TeX on my own
| besides rudimentary macros. I did once try to implement a
| simple typesetting package for typesetting some particularly
| gnarly natural deduction trees, and I thought it worked fine
| for a few examples, but then it broke down in ways that was
| completely non-obvious to me.
|
| The computational model of TeX is really, really opaque to
| me.
| coliveira wrote:
| If you had opened and read the TeX book, you'd understand
| it.
| volemo wrote:
| Oh, you mean those 500 pages of dense Knuth writing?
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Dense? The TeX book is a total delight to read.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Oh definitely, let's do a PhD in Latex and its worthless
| toolchain before start writing the actual thesis.
|
| Software should be invisible and not a hindrance to our
| ability to express ourselves.
| coliveira wrote:
| Reading a single book is not equivalent to a PhD in
| LaTeX.
| bogeholm wrote:
| From experience, you don't need to not have a CS background
| to find TeX/LaTeX difficult or obscure to customize or
| extend.
|
| Here's a challenge to try (I hacked together something
| similar that only works in specific cases): write an
| environment where you get N columns in portrait page mode,
| with a vertical ruler, say, 12pt to the left of each column;
| respecting different paper sizes.
|
| The amount of \makeatother, and what does that even mean??,
| will blow your mind
| fn-mote wrote:
| > The amount of \makeatother, and what does that even
| mean??
|
| I'm not a TeX lover, but this part is just a snipe. I'm
| guessing you know and this was a joke. Apologies that it
| annoyed me enough to write this comment.
|
| If you care enough to read this, you could learn the
| purpose of \makeatother [1]. It's not tricky.
|
| [1]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8351/what-do-
| makeatl...
| esafak wrote:
| Ease of use can't have been top of mind when creating Tex,
| that's all.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| > even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone
| of my university's LaTeX template
|
| That's lucky. Most of us had to do a LaTeX pixel perfect clone
| of our university's MS Word template.
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Ouch ouch ouch. My sympathies :)
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| >on paper absurdly risky
|
| to use a different program for turning equations to pixels?
|
| >pixel perfect clone
|
| why? they wont give you a phd if a single pixel is off by one
| bit in the alpha channel?
| fathermarz wrote:
| If you don't understand what they mean and are hunting for
| pedantic discoveries in explanations of a problem, then
| please try to dig deeper and contribute more meaningfully, as
| per the HN guidelines.
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| please explain to me how anything i said displays pedantry
| or lack of understanding?
|
| THEY were the ones that asserted they needed to be pixel
| perfect, not I!!!
| fathermarz wrote:
| > to use a different program for turning equations to
| pixels?
|
| They explain in the comment why it was risky (new thing
| instead of tried and true methods, not a large user base,
| etc.) and yet you minimized their explanation, over
| simplified and seem to not understand the risk involved
| in writing one of the most important pieces of literature
| in one's career.
|
| > why? they wont give you a phd if a single pixel is off
| by one bit in the alpha channel?
|
| They meant pixel perfect as in matching the template to
| infer the importance of this. Then for some reason you
| went down the "off by one bit in the alpha channel" which
| is a bit of wise-assery and not meaningful nor necessary
| to the conversation.
|
| As I said before, please dig deeper and use your well
| meaning System 2 to contribute, and not your Reddit-
| Tainted System 1.
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| In my experience, formatting is just about the only thing
| that a department/university cares about (outside of the
| folks on the committee), and they will send back a thesis
| until they're satisfied with the formatting, and that means
| lost time. Perhaps throwaway_7274's department has a
| reputation for particular attention to (meaningless) detail.
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| that is a good observation, but it actually proves that the
| riskiest thing you could do with your time is a meaningless
| credentialist PHD, instead of actually learning skills that
| rich people will pay you for immediately without the pomp
| and circumstance
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| While there are formatting guidelines, I've never seen them
| so specific that you could only easily do it in Latex. Is
| that really common?
|
| I've never actually see it as the assumed default option..
| Maybe a decade back I could see that.. but not now.
| echoangle wrote:
| I think there's a Latex template you can use, or you have
| to make your own document that looks as similar as
| possible. It's not a list of guidelines but a template
| that specifies how it's supposed to look.
| afiori wrote:
| The matter isn't really that something is possible only
| in latex, but that a department/university might have its
| own template/document class of arbitrary complexity that
| you would have to reimplement
| TheCondor wrote:
| I suspect it is getting better but I've experienced some
| breaking changes with Typst. Nothing that was terribly
| difficult to fix, debugging it wasn't obvious though.
|
| There seems to be a huge amount of folks that _want_ typst to
| work. I respect TeX and LaTeX, immensely, but it 's so vast and
| byzantine. Maybe I don't know where or what, but some kind of
| clean LaTeX "distribution" is needed. It seems like you could
| build it in to containers or something. Just have some way that
| sort of makes it more of an atomic unit or something. I don't
| know how many times I've pulled down a template started to
| build it and something was missing.
|
| It's good to see innovation in this space and people using it.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Sounds like they could benefit from the R (language) build
| model that checks library changes against registered
| consumers of that library before merging.
|
| https://jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the-world-were-a-
| monorep...
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| > Maybe I don't know where or what, but some kind of clean
| LaTeX "distribution" is needed.
|
| Unfortunately it's a bit like asking for a "clean" Python
| distribution or a "safe" subset of C++. All the baroque mess
| is necessary to get working the many legacy packages that
| many people depend upon. And not just depend upon, but depend
| upon with all their concomitant foibles, bugs, and learned
| work-arounds.
| shrinks99 wrote:
| You should check out this blog post about somebody who did the
| same! https://fransskarman.com/phd_thesis_in_typst.html
| wildzzz wrote:
| Maybe the best compromise here is a markdown interpreter that
| converts to latex so you can use existing libraries and
| templates but not have to worry as much about syntax.
| afiori wrote:
| There are already good html to pdf solutions, people using
| latex generally would not be satisfied with those
| volemo wrote:
| I don't think syntax is the problem here. Using some tool
| that transpiles to LaTeX, you'll still have to fight your TeX
| engine sometimes, but now you also add friction and gotchas
| of your tool that does transpiling.
|
| I've tried writing Org and compiling it to LaTeX, but gave up
| this idea because ultimately I had to figure out
| idiosyncrasies of both LaTeX _and_ Org-mode engines.
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| Pandoc can do this [0], and there's also the "markdown" LaTeX
| package [1].
|
| [0]: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#specifying-formats
|
| [1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/markdown
| ttfvjktesd wrote:
| > even though I'm going to have to make a pixel-perfect clone
| of my university's LaTeX template
|
| I'm not sure if you really mean pixel perfect or if it's just
| an exaggeration. There are packages in latex which are almost
| impossible to replicate in a pixel perfect way, one widely used
| example is microtype, which is especially useful in scientific
| works.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Universities can be infamously nitpicking when it comes to
| thesis formatting and their house style, for some reason.
| humanfromearth9 wrote:
| Compile time is also night and day. Almost instantaneous with
| Typst, always slow with LaTeX. This also contributes to just
| doing the thing that one wants instead of procrastinating -
| it's out of your way and you can just focus on your document.
| flexagoon wrote:
| I love typst. Literally no reason to use LaTeX in 2025 unless you
| really need some specific package or you need to submit raw TeX
| code somewhere
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'll need to give this another go sometime. I gave writing my
| thesis in Typst a go, but ended up using LaTeX/XeTeX because I
| couldn't figure out how to customize the existing templates to my
| liking.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Whenever someone creates a "better and lightweight" successor to
| latex they will over time be asked to, or by themselves need to
| add another small feature to extend its capabilities will over
| time move closer and closer to the LaTex features set.
|
| Or someone will use it and create a large document and find that
| Typst just does not have enough features they need, they will get
| frustrated and feel the need to move over to Latex.
|
| Just like the original markup definition was fine, but then we
| have a forrest over forks or similar projects that add specific
| features someone needed.
|
| That said if your needs are covered by Typst it's certainly
| easier to learn.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Are you implying latex is a global optimum?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I would say that it is the most complete typesetting system
| out there that I know about1
|
| It is not the optimal system that could possibly be created.
| for many reasons.
|
| However as people design new typesetting systems or various
| kinds, and they make it the priority for it to be simple.
| Then usually over time users become restless because the
| markup langauge misses a typesetting feature they would like.
|
| And we wee a plethora of markup forks of all sorts that
| include one set of typesetting additional features that the
| authors deemed nessescary.
|
| The more you devlelop an alternative typesetting system,
| eventually you will need features that are all already
| included in TeX. and they are included because they were
| needed in an advanced typesetting system that would give
| people the tool needed to highly polished outputs.
|
| But TeX is not a system for the masses, nor was it ever meant
| to be.
|
| 1(There may be systems just as good used by print media)
| mbanerjeepalmer wrote:
| I've used Typst to produce books (for https://printstack.net) and
| it's been excellent.
|
| I started with this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42271078
|
| But wouldn't recommend going via Pandoc, for example for this
| reason: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/discussions/10438
|
| Some things like #show rules can be a bit confusing. And
| obviously LLMs can't really help you.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Any experience with using Typst to produce "pixel perfect"
| reproductions of existing documents? At work we have a series of
| contracts that are updated every year, with fillable blanks that
| we fill in with provided data. We currently use latex for them
| and have a contractor is very good at making them look basically
| exactly like the original contracts, but at some point she's
| going to retire, probably sooner rather than later.
|
| Probably our best solution is to decide that we don't care about
| nearly pixel perfect reproduction of the contract, which probably
| makes a switch to typst a lot easier.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I've reproduced documents with Typst, mostly pixel perfect.
| I've done the same in LaTeX before, and it was orders of
| magnitudes easier with Typst. However, I didn't care if a
| couple of paragraphs with hundreds of words in them were a line
| longer or shorter. That might be an issue if you care about
| literal pixel perfection. But why would that be important in
| contracts?
| ossner wrote:
| The crucial component for the success of this, in my opinion, is
| the acceptance of Typst templates in scientific journals and
| conferences. The adoption of something like this in universities
| relies entirely on the adoption by these publishers.
|
| I see almost no support in the scientific community for Typst
| since everyone already has a LaTeX template for a thesis, paper,
| slides, etc. Researchers need to take the initiative and create a
| template that is accepted by first a chair, then propagate it in
| the university and try and get it popular enough so that it
| hopefully forces the creation of templates for conferences and
| journals.
|
| This is an incredibly long, tedious, (and I am guessing ongoing)
| process, but one that is crucial for Typst to be a real contender
| with LaTeX
| coliveira wrote:
| We don't want to do this because LaTeX already solves our
| problems quite well.
| didericis wrote:
| I'm probably ignorant to specific issues that make more
| advanced typesetting for journal submissions necessary, but I
| don't understand why some academic flavor of markdown isn't the
| standard. I'd advocate for that before either LaTeX or Typst.
|
| I absolutely get the importance of typesetting for people who
| publish physical books/magazines/etc, but when it comes to
| research I don't see the value of typsetting anything. Journals
| or print publishers should be responsible for typsetting
| submissions to fit their style/paper size/etc, and researchers
| should just be responsible for delivering their research in a
| format that's simpler and more content focused.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| I had originally dismissed Typst, since at first glance it seemed
| like some closed online-only tool. But actually there's solutions
| such as Typstify[1] which works offline, haven't tried it yet but
| seemed promising.
|
| [1]: https://typstify.com/
| aeve890 wrote:
| Typst is open source. It can be used as a cli tool
| https://github.com/typst/typst
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Is the format "open" as well?
| colonial wrote:
| There's also an LSP (Tinymist.) My Typst workflow is all
| local in VSCode, with the source markup in the left pane and
| a live preview on the right.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Long term Latex user here, I've been working on generating
| automatic invoices in Typst for a year now.
|
| On the plus side:
|
| * Getting structured data into typst is sooo much simpler than
| into latex. For latex, you basically have to render a template,
| and have to know all the crazy escaping rules for special
| characters. In typst, you can just read a json file, and do the
| rendering in typst.
|
| * Super fast. Love it.
|
| * Mostly very easy to use.
|
| Minus:
|
| * Our invoices are structured as multi-page tables, and widow and
| orphan prevention in a multi-page table seems to be non-existent.
| The workarounds we tried were too disruptive (lead to text
| overlapping other text, for example).
|
| * There's a bug in the Python wrapper that means we sometimes
| don't get a proper error message when there happens to be an
| error, then we have to recreate the scenario on the command line
| to find out what the error was.
|
| * Docs could be better (but are mostly OK)
|
| Overall I'm very happy with typst for this use case.
| Squeeeez wrote:
| Looking at the examples on the website, I can see the appeal
| regarding the input. The output makes my head slightly dizzy -
| not sure why, but like the letters are all slightly off, in both
| dimensions. Is it just me, or the font/screen combination, or did
| it occur to anyone else also?
| braincat31415 wrote:
| Is anyone here still using [tg]roff?
| Ademseifu wrote:
| Yes more
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I'm working through the tutorial on the WSIWYG official webapp
| now. The syntax for equations is remarkably intuitive! I tried a
| few things from guessing after skimming the tutorial, and they
| mostly worked in the most intuitive way. Here is what I gather
| this _is_. A mix of: - Markdown general
| formatting (images, lists etc) - LaTeX or MathJax-like
| equation syntax - A rendering engine and software that
| turns these into pixels
|
| Is this right?
| hn-ifs wrote:
| I'm a masters student, I've gone with a quarto workflow. From
| quarto markdown to Word, little bit of VBA for tables and images,
| and to pdf from there if needed. Technically I could go straight
| to pdf, but not tried that yet.
| malshe wrote:
| Quarto has typst support. You can create pdf documents quite
| easily as explained here: https://quarto.org/docs/output-
| formats/typst.html
| mattxxx wrote:
| typst is so good! the syntax is cleaner, and it's much easier to
| write re-usable and clever formatting.
|
| LaTeX will have a special spot in my heart, but it's pretty
| bloated (even minimalist distributions) and suffers from being an
| early pass at a problem.
| topaz0 wrote:
| The programming parts are very tempting, but I find the
| philosophy of the math mode input simplification to be
| questionable. E.g. automatically generating fractions from "/",
| or removing parentheses depending on whether they are redundant
| with other grouping. Those are all choices that I want explicit
| control over, and the most readable choice depends strongly on
| the details of the expressions. After some digging it's clear
| that all of that can be overridden without too much effort, but
| it still seems like a poor default for my use cases.
| hkmaxpro wrote:
| I am also not a fan of automatic fraction.
|
| BTW, I notice that both of your complaints will be addressed in
| the next version:
|
| https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6672
|
| https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/6442 , see also
| https://laurmaedje.github.io/posts/math-mode-problem/
| fgdelcueto wrote:
| I had been using LaTeX for 25 years. I gave it a try recently to
| write a technical paper and I was blown away. I saved so much
| time. The immediate feedback and the advanced features were
| impressive. I had to include a budget proposal in one of the
| chapters and I was able to create a quick script that read a csv
| file with the different concepts and costs. I would modify the
| contents of the csv file and the document would update right
| away. I didn't have to recompile the document as I used to do
| with LaTeX... the results were there, right away, beautifully
| formatted. I am very impressed and will definitely consider doing
| more work with Typst.
| locao wrote:
| My first thought was "why would anyone want to ditch LaTeX?". But
| it's been almost 20 years I left academy, so I knew I would be
| missing something.
|
| Reading the comments reminded me of the pain.
|
| I didn't see anyone mentioning, maybe it was me "holding it
| wrong", but boy what have I done to get proper references. After
| a year or so writing articles I had an unfailing process to get
| them right, but whenever I tried to explain it to my colleagues I
| heard "yeah, ok, I'm staying in MS Word".
|
| I also did a pixel-perfect template for my university. As a
| programmer, I never felt so ashamed of sharing something. I felt
| like it would be selfish to keep it to myself, so I did it, but
| it almost physically hurt me. After 10 years people stopped
| emailing me asking for help. Maybe they fixed the template or
| just ditched LaTeX at all.
|
| As I'm planning to get back to academy next year, it was good to
| learn about Typist.
| xvilka wrote:
| There is still continued work on LaTeX3[1][2], but it took so
| long without any release[3], by this time not sure if it will get
| adopted.
|
| [1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/
|
| [2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3
|
| [3] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/572113/whats-the-
| cur...
| gucci-on-fleek wrote:
| LaTeX3 has either been cancelled or has already happened,
| depending on how you look at at. [0] But despite that, LaTeX is
| still continuously improving, although it will never beat Typst
| on speed or simpler markup.
|
| [0]: https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/11/the-mythical-latex3
| anonu wrote:
| Anyone have success with typesetting in HTML and then printing to
| PDF? This works really well for me and if your application is web
| centric then it's an easy win if you need to generate PDFs as
| well.
| malshe wrote:
| I think the go to solution is weasyprint for this?
| https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint
| mcswell wrote:
| From the article: "Typst... can, for example, easily split large
| tables across page breaks, something that LaTeX struggles with
| even with specialized packages." That would be nice. I remember
| when I first started working with LaTeX that I was surprised that
| I needed to decide ahead of time whether a table would fit on one
| page or not. If Typst can make that decision on its own, that's a
| step forward.
|
| One thing I have not seen mentioned as yet: cross-references. In
| LaTeX, I can create cross references to anything: page number,
| table or figure number, even an item in a numbered list. Does
| Typst have that capability? I saw a package for cross-referencing
| numbered boxes (it's called statementsp), but it wasn't clear how
| you xref other things. (Not saying it's not there, it just
| doesn't jump out at me.)
| flokl wrote:
| yes, cross-references are possible by adding an <anchor> and
| referencing it with @anchor. It works for headings, figures,
| equations, footnotes, and with a slightly different syntax also
| for page. [1] Numbered lists are currently not natively
| supported, only with the package itemize [2].
|
| [1] https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/ref/
|
| [2] https://typst.app/universe/package/itemize
| jedberg wrote:
| > Another drawback is the difficulty of learning Typst. The
| official documentation is confusingly organized, with information
| scattered unpredictably among "Tutorial", "Reference", and
| "Guides" sections.
|
| They should add Dosu[0] to their repo. Dosu works with a lot of
| open source packages already.
|
| [0] https://dosu.dev
| tkw01536 wrote:
| Like other commentators, I have worked with LaTeX for a long time
| (> 10 years) and have to say that it very much shows its age.
|
| For once, the compilation time is terrible - it can take several
| minutes to compile a typical document. I recently tried to create
| a poster for a conference - a single A0 page - and even this took
| more than a minute to compile. Because positioning in images and
| figures in LaTeX is not obvious, this made iteration extremely
| slow.
|
| Additionally, by forgetting a single bracket, one can easily
| encounter cryptic error messages relating to boxes. In the past,
| I have also worked on LaTeXML (the LaTeX-to-HTML "converter"
| amongst other things being used to power ar5iv [1]). Even though
| this exposed me to some of (La)TeX's internals, it is still
| extremely difficult trying to decipher error messages.
|
| Typst, on the other hand, is much faster when compiling and
| provides much clearer error messages.
|
| For this reason, I also decided to write my 130-something PhD
| dissertation in Typst [2]. My university only provided a LaTeX
| and a Word template, but I ended up copying that in Typst
| extremely quickly. My thesis compiles in about 7 seconds on my
| laptop - I cannot imagine how long it would take had I chosen
| LaTeX instead. Not only that, when I showed an initial draft of
| my dissertation to my supervisor - also a decades-long LaTeX user
| - he could not tell that I wasn't using LaTeX.
|
| I only really encountered one problem with Typst so far -
| citation styles. In particular, the alphanumeric style preferred
| by my field produced duplicate citation keys, making the output
| unreadable in printed form. But given all the other benefits
| Typst offered, I ended up switching to IEEE's citation style
| instead.
|
| I am also hoping that Typst improves its HTML export - it is very
| barebones at the moment - but that seems to be in the works [3].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36947004
|
| [2] https://doi.org/10.25593/open-fau-1825
|
| [3] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/5512
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Hey, I've had the same problem with duplicate citation keys! I
| couldn't find an issue on it. One of us should file a bug
| report.
| tkw01536 wrote:
| I already did [1]. It got moved into hayagriva, which appears
| to be the library used to implement citation in typst.
|
| [1] https://github.com/typst/hayagriva/issues/255
| throwaway_7274 wrote:
| Amazing, thanks!
| netbioserror wrote:
| I'm becoming acutely aware of the first-mover problem in open
| source software: Nobody truly knows how the software is going to
| be used in half a century. And once that time is past, the
| accumulated tech debt of the first-generation tool should
| probably just be thrown out entirely, for a new second-generation
| tool that easily does what people have shown they actually want
| do with it.
|
| I've been using Typst for work documentation and hobby
| authorship. It is unreal how powerful it is out of the box, with
| no plugins. It's a Turing-complete programming language where you
| can switch between a code context and a document context with a
| simple change of brackets. Everything you WISH Latex did out of
| the box, it does. Highly recommend the VSCode plugin with live
| PDF generation and automatic scrolling.
| colonial wrote:
| Another stamp of approval for Typst here.
|
| It's simple enough that I can easily typeset CS theory homework
| (with all the fancy notation that entails) _without_ having to
| subject myself to the insanity of LaTeX or the friction of a
| standard word processor.
|
| But at the same time, I can also crank out a full paper in a
| (professor mandated, LaTeX templated) style without raising any
| eyebrows.
|
| The fact that it's a "real" programming language is also lovely -
| I have a very simple template (took me an ~hour to write) that
| ingests TOML descriptions of recipes and marshals them into
| pretty, standardized PDFs for my recipe binder.
| slashdave wrote:
| Tex was for math lovers. And as a math lover, using a parenthesis
| for $\arcsin^2 x$ already turns me off to this page.
| jamamp wrote:
| > Another drawback is the difficulty of learning Typst. The
| official documentation is confusingly organized, with information
| scattered unpredictably among "Tutorial", "Reference", and
| "Guides" sections.
|
| I would have thought that this method of organizing documentation
| is preferred, as I assumed The Grand Unified Theory of
| Documentation[0] was well known and liked.
|
| [0] https://docs.divio.com/documentation-system/
| tiagod wrote:
| I've written a system that consists of a JS front-end/backend,
| which then feeds a json object to a typst template to generate
| PDF reports with hundreds of pages, multipage tables, references
| to bibliography within the json strings, and translated to
| multiple languages. It works extremely well, and it's very
| intuitive to work with it.
|
| For example, for the translations, I just made an object with
| every piece of text in a hierarchical structure, with the leaf
| being an object with keys for every language and the texts as
| values. Then I have a function called t() that is created after
| we already know the language for this report that just extracts
| the current language string when given an object like
| #t(content.section1.subsection.header.title) in the main report
| template (which imports this translations object from another
| file)
|
| For bibliography references, I just have a regex for __REF\d+
| that will replace all those references with real bibtex
| references.
| codedokode wrote:
| Markdown is an awful choice - it has no definition, and it is
| difficult once you need something more complicated that a
| paragraph with a header (for example: a list with multi-paragraph
| items, forced line break etc).
| xurukefi wrote:
| The LaTeX community is astonishingly good at gatekeeping. I can't
| think of another field where the adoption of a clearly superior
| modern alternative has been so slow. For some reason, they seem
| to take pride in clinging to a 50-year-old typesetting system--
| with its bloated footprint, sluggish compilation,
| incomprehensible error messages, and a baroque syntax that nobody
| truly understands. People have simply learned just enough to make
| it work, and now they treat that fragile familiarity as a virtue.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| The problem is that with Latex i end up in the same situation
| like in Word. I do not understand what is happenig and why.
|
| Typst was an amazing addition to the modern IT stack. I use it
| whenever I can. The only issue is that companies like Google
| and Micrososft are dominating the collaboration space and I
| have zero chance to convince a comany to adopt Typst for
| internal documents that need to look good. It would be great
| though.
| bolangi wrote:
| Don't forget other alternatives. On the pre-unicode side, we have
| lout http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/ . On the postmodern side,
| we have rakudoc https://raku.github.io/rakudoc .
| hacb wrote:
| I'm teaching compsci at university, and since a few years I
| create all the material I use (slides, exams, sometimes booklets)
| in Typst. It does perfectly the job, and it's fast. I'm 100%
| convinced, even tho I was not a big LaTeX user before, so can't
| compare the two.
| sombragris wrote:
| I doubt it would come to completely replace LaTeX. The momentum
| behind LaTeX is enormous. Having said that, if it manages to
| simplify language handling, fonts, and bibliographhies it would
| be great.
|
| But, especially, it would be good to see whether it improves on
| LaTeX's handling of tabulars (tables) and floats (figures),
| somethingh that is kind of an esoteric art right now. I wish
| Typst the best.
| dkga wrote:
| As an economist, I write papers for a living. I use quarto
| markdown, which takes latex and typst and leverages pandoc behind
| the scenes to render PDFs or other formats. It's as easy as it
| gets.
| vladdoster wrote:
| The git repository[0] for your typist to latex filter in the
| "transform" article[1] you link in the conclusion returns a 403
| error :/
|
| I'd love to see the code
|
| [0]https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/code
|
| [1] https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters
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(page generated 2025-09-27 23:00 UTC)