[HN Gopher] Typst 0.14
___________________________________________________________________
Typst 0.14
Author : optionalsquid
Score : 496 points
Date : 2025-10-24 12:33 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (typst.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (typst.app)
| fsh wrote:
| This is great! Having PDFs as a native image format removes one
| of the biggest hurdles for replacing LaTeX with Typst.
| dgacmu wrote:
| I literally was just working around this two days ago with
| muchpdf and now it's built in. Woo.
| laszlokorte wrote:
| Typst is such a pleasure to work with! Especially compiled to
| wasm in the browser, super fast
| constantcrying wrote:
| Really great work. Typst continues to impress. The eventual goal
| of HTML and PDF both as first class output will be a such a great
| improvement for scientific publishing.
|
| For everyone who is using LaTeX and hasn't tried yet, give it a
| try. It is actually surprisingly featurefull and surpasses LaTeX
| in usability by a huge margin.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It sounds like it takes up a similar niche as PanDoc. Is there
| any particular feature that Typst is better at or is it mostly
| about ease of use? (I remember Pandoc to be quite nice to use
| for simple use cases while also allowing the full set of latex
| stuff when needed)
|
| https://pandoc.org/
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| Pandoc isn't a typesetter, it's more a translation engine
| between various typesetting languages (and it can then _call_
| the typesetter).
|
| Pandoc is a ridiculously underrated and powerful tool but it
| solves a different problem. Someone still has to write
| typesetters ;)
| constantcrying wrote:
| These are different categories of software.
|
| Typst is a way to define a document. Headers, paragraphs,
| figures, equations, tables, etc. it is a direct competitor to
| LaTeX and maybe in some ways similar to Word, which provides
| a GUI for an XML defined document.
|
| Pandoc is a converter, which given a document in one document
| description language outputs a document in another document
| description language.
|
| What is exciting about Typst HTML support is that its goal is
| that it has _first class_ support for both PDF and HTMl,
| which is obviously preferable to something like pandoc, which
| always has to rely on an intermediate representation of the
| document, before a conversion can happen.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or less?)
| maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in PanDoc, plus
| allows embedding other formats when necessary, or
| conditionally include some content only for some output
| formats.
|
| It's a great format to use for editing, since it converts
| so well to all the other formats (including Typst?).
|
| https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#pandocs-markdown
| constantcrying wrote:
| >PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or
| less?) maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in
| PanDoc
|
| Which is bad if you want a complex document, since the
| intermediate representation of pandoc can not represent
| all typst features.
|
| Also, I do not understand what your argument is. Pandoc
| and typst are not competing, they are different pieces of
| software with different goals. Pandocs markdown is also
| not competing with typst, since they are completely
| different ways to define a document. Typst is vastly more
| complex, it even includes its own scripting language.
| Pandoc also doesn't output PDF, except by calling some
| external tool, which then compiles a pandoc output format
| to HTML. It is fundamentally different to typst.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| I agree they are not competing at all, and I will
| definitely consider Typst as an alternative to LaTeX,
| which to me is one of the output formats I use in PanDoc,
| and I might end up using Typst instead of LaTeX as an
| intermediate format when generating PDFs. I have not had
| to fall back to write LaTeX in several years and tend to
| get away with at most a few lines of inlined LaTeX in my
| Markdown files, and I expect it will be possible to
| inline some Typst code if necessary as well. Happy with
| PanDoc's Lua filters when I need to script something.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| In addition to what the other commentors write, an advantage
| of Typst is that it is self-contained:
|
| You just need one (large) executable to do everything,
| whereas with PanDoc you (by default) need to have LaTeX
| installed if you want to generate PDFs
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| PanDoc has Typst as an output format, so it should be
| possible to just keep using PanDoc Markdown (for instance)
| and just switch to Typst output if that is (or becomes)
| better than LaTeX.
| mfsch wrote:
| If you are just creating a simple document with default
| styling, the main advantage you get from Typst is near-
| instant compilation speed. Pandoc to HTML is similar though,
| but if you're generating PDFs with LaTeX the compilation
| delays can be pretty annoying.
|
| If you are creating more complex documents, the advantages
| become more pronounced. Styling in Pandoc means modifying
| templates, at which point you're just writing LaTeX, and
| styling in Typst is _much_ nicer than in LaTeX. You can also
| hit the limits of Pandoc templates quite easily, at which
| point you have to write Lua filters. I have found those to be
| quite cumbersome, and now your document logic is spread out
| over the Markdown source file, the LaTeX template, and the
| Lua filters. In Typst you can have a single file with your
| whole document in a clean modern format, and you can decide
| for yourself how much you want to separate content and
| presentation.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I use pandoc to convert markdown to physical books (with
| typst) and ebooks (epub) for my self-publishing empire.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| There's usually some confusion about this, so to clarify in
| advance:
|
| - The Typst online editor is proprietary: https://typst.app
|
| - The Typst compiler/CLI is open source:
| https://github.com/typst/typst
|
| I hear that the online editor is quite good, but personally I've
| only ever used the CLI.
|
| I originally picked up Typst as yet another replacement for
| PowerPoint (replacing my use of Marp), but have since used it for
| a poster and some minor text documents. And I've been very happy
| the results. I know that a lot of people love using LaTeX for
| that kind of thing, and with good reasons, but I always forgot
| most of the details between my (occasional) use of LaTeX, while
| I've found Typst to be very easy to return to
| jadodev wrote:
| TinyMist is a great alternative to the online editor for local
| development in VS Code / Cursor https://myriad-
| dreamin.github.io/tinymist/
| optionalsquid wrote:
| Yeah, that's also what I've been using, and yes it is very
| good. Thank you for bringing it up
| imiric wrote:
| This is a great example of the open core model done right. Have
| a fully-featured F/LOSS product, and build value-add commercial
| products and services on top of it.
|
| I've also only used the CLI tool, and didn't miss any features
| from it. The commercial product was never pushed or promoted to
| me. I personally have no need for it, and I'm only vaguely
| aware that it exists. But I'm sure that people who do need the
| friendlier UI/UX and more advanced features would be willing to
| pay for it, so I'm glad that the team has a stable source of
| income that enables them to continue maintaining the project in
| the long-term.
|
| Looking at the pricing page now... Wow, the plans are quite
| generous and affordable. Way to go!
| croes wrote:
| It's a great example how many open source projects start ...
| until they change.
| imiric wrote:
| I mean, we can be cynical about it, or we can acknowledge
| the fact that running a sustainable business around OSS is
| entrepreneurship on hard mode.
|
| Yes, many companies start with good intentions which then
| change at some point, but there have also been companies
| that have managed to successfully balance both sides.
|
| Grafana comes to mind, as well as ClickHouse, and
| TimescaleDB. I'm not as familiar with the latter two, but
| Grafana is certainly a good example. You can probably find
| some blemishes even on their record, but overall, I would
| say they have been excellent stewards of OSS. Especially
| considering the large amount of products they maintain.
|
| So far, Typst seem to be on the right track as well, which
| is worthy of praise.
| commandersaki wrote:
| I don't really need the web version, but I pay for a yearly
| subscription to support development of Typst.
|
| I do find the web version handy to share Typst examples and
| on occasion work on a document while syncing with private
| Github repository.
| agentcoops wrote:
| I used LaTeX for decades and had convinced myself nothing could
| ever replace it. Just this month, however, I converted to Typst
| for a large project. Absolutely no regrets: undying respect to
| the great Knuth, but the experience with Typst is already
| simply better on almost every axis. I use TinyMist with vscode
| and the development experience is terrific. I was modifying
| templates within a day of picking it up, which---skill issue
| undoubtedly---always gave me nightmares in LaTeX.
| imiric wrote:
| Speaking of skill, learning a new language is always
| daunting, but I found that LLMs do a pretty good job of
| generating Typst code. I relied on that a lot for generating
| snippets of code, and learning about the language, which
| would've taken me more time otherwise. Although the Typst
| docs are pretty good, regardless.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Yep this is how I started my Typst journey. I was
| intimidated by Typst at first and wanted to do some mildly
| complicated documents that really isn't covered by the
| tutorial, so I had ChatGPT generate elements of the
| document I need. Now I'm a more self-sufficient being able
| to generate functions and use more complicated features of
| Typst and better exercise use of the docs.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What LLMs? In my experience they do a terrible job with
| Typst. Very frequently ChatGPT and Gemini will produce code
| that doesnt work. Im not sure if it's using an older syntax
| or just hallucinating. Additionally, it's rarely able to
| fix it after I provide the error and even copy-past docs.
|
| Maybe I was just unlucky or you had better luck with
| another model. But I was very surprised to here this
| because Typst is my chief example for a language that LLMs
| are bad at.
| imiric wrote:
| This was a few months ago, but mainly Claude Sonnet 3.5
| IIRC.
|
| You can't escape hallucinations, of course, but they can
| be mitigated somewhat. Don't ask it to generate a bunch
| of code at once. Feed it a snippet of code, and tell it
| precisely what you want it to do. These are general LLM
| rules applicable to any language and project, and I've
| had success with them with Typst. I also used it just to
| get explanations, or general ideas about how to do
| something, and then figure out the actual syntax and
| working code myself. It's strange that you haven't had
| luck with pasting docs. That has usually worked well for
| me.
|
| I also think that LLMs don't struggle as much with Typst
| because the language is relatively simple, and there is
| little bad and outdated content about it online, so they
| weren't trained on it. I assume that the API probably
| hasn't changed as much either and there haven't been many
| compatibility issues, so it's not as important which
| version the LLM was trained on.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It failed miserably with very simple requests. It was
| wrong but it wasn't clear if it was hallucinating or
| simply using old syntax.
|
| I did not try Claude though. Perhaps that performs
| better.
|
| edit: I just prompted chatGPT with this and pasted the
| result into the Typst editor. 20 compile errors.
|
| >Make a Typst doc with two columns per page and US page
| dimensions
|
| Same prompt but for Latex and pasted in overleaf. No
| problems.
| busyant wrote:
| > but I found that LLMs do a pretty good job of generating
| Typst code.
|
| Interestingly, I've had the opposite experience. ChatGPT
| and Claude repeatedly gave me errors, apologized profusely,
| and then said, "ah, I had the wrong keyword. It's actually
| <blahblah>"--and that would simply give me another error
| and a subsequent apology.
|
| At least Gemini had the good taste of telling me that it
| didn't know how to do what I wanted with typst.
|
| It's certainly possible that I was trying to do something a
| little too unusual (who knows), but I chalked it up to the
| LLMs not having a large enough corpus of training text.
|
| On the bright side, the typst documentation is quite good
| and it was just a matter of adjusting example code that got
| me on track.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 100% agree. With tex it feels like when you use a package or
| template, you're stuck with every choice it made because
| changing it yourself is just too daunting. With Typst I feel
| confident that I can go in and muck with whatever I don't
| like. It's a really refreshing feeling.
| evertedsphere wrote:
| famously knuth was trying to (and pretty much did) solve
| digital typesetting not create a nice piece of hci so this is
| all as it should be or at least as might be expected
| agentcoops wrote:
| Staying in his lane, living his best life--dropping
| incredible things to humanity ever now and then. I had to
| check since I hadn't thought about it for... a decade
| apparently, but looks like TAOCP 4B came out a couple years
| ago.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The two applications were developed on quite different
| computers and with quite different toolchains.
|
| Interestingly, Knuth has stated that his development of
| Literate Programming:
|
| http://literateprogramming.com/
|
| was more important than TeX --- fortunately, his publishing
| _TeX: The Program_:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/499934.Computers_Typeset.
| ..
|
| has been very helpful to folks developing successors and add-
| ons and new versions, facilitating the creation of web2c and
| change files which made tools such as pdftex and omega and
| xetex and luatex possible).
| s777 wrote:
| The online editor is extremely useful for quick projects with
| other people where real-time editing works better than git, and
| where people don't want to download tools.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Speaking of core product and online editor: Over the decades
| many of the products I worked on developed some form of
| reporting feature.
|
| Not alway, but often they required PDF output. Not always, but
| often they ended up being LaTeX based, with all the nice and
| some of the ugly consequences. Especially the security story
| was never great.
|
| Does anyone know how hard it would be to integrate the Typst
| renderer into an existing Rust product?
| tugten wrote:
| I embed the typst binary in a go binary deployed to cloud
| run. I use this to generate pdfs on the fly.
|
| I need to generate a 2 page invoice and i can generate it
| under 100 ms. IIRC, it's easier to integrate with rust. Since
| the pdf rendered is written in rust
| lonjil wrote:
| Not particularly difficult. The main Typst crate should have
| you covered. I've seen quite a lot of projects that do it
| already.
| jadbox wrote:
| I LOVE Marp! Why do you like Typst more than Marp for
| presentations?
| optionalsquid wrote:
| I much preferred Marp to PowerPoint, but there were several
| parts of it I wasn't fond of:
|
| - Using CSS for formatting resulted in a lot of one-off
| rules, and was a lot noisier and less readable than the
| equivalent in Typst.
|
| - The use of CSS for formatting also meant that the Marp
| compiler couldn't catch most of my silly mistakes. With Typst
| the compiler will catch those mistakes.
|
| - Using a plugin to selectively highlight lines required
| writing a custom "engine" in JS, which was a pain to get
| working. Using a package in Typst is extremely simple.
|
| - And I had to use npm to install the plugin in the first
| place. Typst comes with a package manager built-in.
|
| - Generating PDFs required that I installed Chrome/Chromium.
| Typst does that out of the box.
|
| The only place, that I can think of, where Marp is ahead of
| Typst, is with regards to generating HTML based
| presentations. But that probably won't be the case forever,
| and I personally always use PDFs for the final presentation,
| since that means that a lot less can go wrong. Especially so
| if I am not using my own PC when giving the presentation
| setopt wrote:
| > I originally picked up Typst as yet another replacement for
| PowerPoint
|
| I've also mainly used it for slides so far. Can recommend
| Slydst for that.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| I've been using touying so far. It took some effort, since I
| was learning Typst at the same time, but I was able to
| convert our "official" PowerPoint template to a toying
| template that I am quite happy with.
|
| From what I can tell, Slydst seems intended for more
| minimalist slides. But it looks nice, so I'll have to keep it
| in mind for cases where I don't need the above template
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| How do you translate a bit more visually complex presentation
| to Typst? Should I create my iconography in SVG and try to
| position those?
| optionalsquid wrote:
| What do you mean by a "more visually complex presentation"?
| Typst has some built in support for drawing shapes [1], but
| if you need more complex figures then cetz is also an option
| [2].
|
| But if you mean animations (including animated transitions),
| then I do not believe that it is possible in Typst, since the
| output it outputs PDFs. I also do not believe that it is
| possible to embed multimedia in a document.
|
| [1] https://typst.app/docs/reference/visualize/
|
| [2] https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz/
| culi wrote:
| isitreallyfoss.com did a break down on typst that goes more in-
| depth
|
| https://isitreallyfoss.com/projects/typst/
|
| It seems mostly fine except for this bit:
|
| > The compiler includes a package manager "Typst Universe" that
| may connect to servers owned and operated by Typst GmbH
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Converted to Typst last year from LaTeX for book authoring,
| invoices, and slides (was using a hand-rolled rst2ppt tool for
| slides). Happy to never touch LaTeX again. Typst is that good.
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| I think I'm going to subscribe without any intention of using the
| app just as a "financing" donation.
|
| I love, and hate, LaTeX and the idea of a LaTeX successor /
| alternative is incredibly appealing.
|
| And the fact that they are aware that microtypography IS
| important and that they are working on it is a huge huge plus.
| garganzol wrote:
| LaTex is not too bad but it's hard to cook properly. My
| personal pain point with LaTex is that it depends so much on
| environment where it runs.
| 1-more wrote:
| I've had some success setting up nix flakes for this! Using
| an LLM assist I even got a single font changed. I had
| previously run a bunch of scripts as root with no idea what I
| was doing in order to effect the same change. Annoying!
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| Typst is open source, so you can run it on your computer; it's
| available as a CLI and has integrations with multiples IDEs
| (most use tinymist). Using typst is better than subscribing and
| not using it IMO because you can already start creating content
| and advocating for it, while telling the team about bugs or
| pain points
| tcfhgj wrote:
| you can use the cli, subscribe (to the pro features of the
| app) and not use the app (online editor) to provide a bit of
| financial support WHILE using Typst and create content
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| Exactly my plan yes :)
| netbioserror wrote:
| First-gen 50-year-old open source suffers from a first-mover
| problem of not knowing how people will use the thing. Thus, 50
| years later, we end up with multiple-gigabyte distributions and
| messy, inconsistent syntactic approaches to hack together what
| people want and need.
|
| Typst has 50 years of accumulated TeX experiences to learn
| from, and fit everything people actually want to use into a 45M
| binary, and maybe you'll download a few dozen K of package
| scripts.
|
| I have used it for much more than academic publishing (book,
| brochure, and even card layout) and it's hands-down the best
| tool ever made for producing documents of any imaginable kind.
| Procedurally producing layouts from first-class JSON and CSV
| support is bliss.
| AlanYx wrote:
| Have they indicated that they are working on microtypography
| support?
|
| The example in this link of character-level justification is
| incredibly nice (enough to get me to try Typst), but it's not
| clear at least from this link whether they're actively working
| on microtypography.
| commandersaki wrote:
| I have made direct donations and I now just support financially
| by paying for a subscription to the web app.
|
| I find myself switching between cli and web app a little more;
| the web app seems nice to experiment, share experiments
| especially when you need to demonstrate an issue when getting
| support, and has good enough git(hub) integration.
|
| I would like Typst to support bounties, because I would throw a
| bit more towards HTML support.
| garganzol wrote:
| I tried it, and it's already impressive for neither requiring a
| login page nor having ad-nonsense. I wish more web apps were like
| that.
| mastax wrote:
| > Meanwhile, in HTML and SVG export, PDFs are converted to an
| embedded SVG on-the-fly. And, finally, in PNG export and the web
| app preview, PDFs are rasterized. All of this PDF processing
| functionality lives right in the Typst compiler, with no system
| dependencies. This is only possible thanks to the amazing work of
| community member @LaurenzV, who created a new PDF processing
| library called hayro from scratch. The library is 100% written in
| the programming language Rust (which is also the language we use
| for the Typst compiler) and is thus highly portable.
|
| Wow! That must've been quite an effort.
| lukax wrote:
| And the hayro library is standalone and can easily be used
| outside of Typst. It only uses CPU and is pure Rust so it can
| also be used with WebAsembly. Link to demo below.
|
| https://github.com/LaurenzV/hayro
|
| https://laurenzv.github.io/hayro/
| cbolton wrote:
| Indeed... I wonder to what extent the author of hayro did this
| work specifically for Typst or if they would have done it
| anyway.
| Vallaaaris wrote:
| Author here! Resolving one of the most-requested Typst
| features was definitely a big motivation for me, but I
| wouldn't say this was the only reason. I've done a lot of
| previous work on PDF (see e.g. the krilla library, although
| also mostly in the context of Typst), so I was already pretty
| familiar with how PDF works. In addition to that, I also just
| finished writing my master's thesis about 2D rendering (also
| in Rust), so I also gained a lot of knowledge in that area.
| Therefore, this project seemed like a good opportunity for me
| to create a bigger open source project myself that I could
| work on in my free time. :)
| IshKebab wrote:
| And a job offer I hope!
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Would it be feasible, with hayro-interpret and krilla, to
| take an existing PDF and round-trip each of the pages while
| wrapping the contents in marked content spans and adding
| tags, to remediate the accessibility of an existing PDF?
| Round-tripping each of the page content streams through a
| full-featured PDF interpreter seems cleaner than trying to
| edit in-place. PDFium can round-trip the content streams
| and add the marked content spans, but can't do the tagging.
| What do you think?
| Vallaaaris wrote:
| Yeah, this is definitely a goal for the future. But there
| is still quite a bit of work needed in both libraries to
| make this possible.
| cbolton wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the background. It's impressive work.
| Makes me curious about your thesis... Is it publicly
| available?
| Vallaaaris wrote:
| Not yet, but it should hopefully be graded in 1-2 weeks
| and then I can share it!
| pbronez wrote:
| Thanks for your contribution!
| thiht wrote:
| Impressive work, congrats!
| devinprater wrote:
| Kinda wonder how accessible the online editor is? I should try
| it, see if VS Code is a linter or something for it, although
| there is the compiler.
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| VScode has an extension that uses the language server tinymist,
| which is available in other IDEs as well. The vscode extension
| offers live preview, but it's also available on other IDEs
| mfro wrote:
| I found the online editor really easy to use, but it doesn't
| expose all of the functionality in GUI, you'll need to read
| docs.
| elashri wrote:
| The killer features of LaTeX that does not let me go with typst
| (Although I like my typst generated resume) as an academic are.
|
| 1. Beamer, I create multiple slide decks per week and the out of
| the box setup that beamer provides with different styles and
| fonts for different needs are unmatched. The efforts to generate
| some of this on typst is not there yet.
|
| 2. Generating figures using tikz and be able to modify it on the
| source file. Because I don't bear using GUI tools. And now life
| is easier that LLM can help you with complex tikz generation.
|
| 3. Not that it is actually a point but I am used now to overleaf
| and I have professional account as CERN member. It is also better
| on collaboration level and features than typst cloud.
|
| I hope that one day typst will grow into this direction so that I
| can stop using LaTeX. Until then I have couple of overleaf
| templates generated for my use.
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| Maybe you have already checked these, but in case you haven't:
| - https://touying-typ.github.io/ Creating slides in Typst -
| https://cetz-package.github.io/ CeTZ is a package that allows
| for drawing with Typst with an API inspired by TikZ and
| Processing. It also provides plotting and chart libraries and
| is used in several other packages to create circuit, fretboard
| and more diagrams - maybe try getting your team to use version
| control? You may this that it's a lost cause, but existing
| version control schemes (like git) work very great for textual
| formats, including with LaTeX or Typst
| Certhas wrote:
| These are great suggestions, but did I understand that
| suggest git as an alternative to overleaf? That's... not at
| all reasonable, as well as completely missing what problems
| overleaf solves for which people. Overleaf ist git und the
| hood. But what it really provides is Google Docs style
| collaboration on Latex documents.
|
| Reviewing the changes I review in Overleaf in GitHub pull
| requests would be incredibly painful and introduce a
| completely new, convoluted and unintuitive (until you're used
| to it) workflow for collaborative editing.
| fmoralesc wrote:
| Some quick remarks:
|
| 1) I have been using typst to create slides with some success.
| Adding special features tends to be simpler than in beamer.
|
| 2) cetz (https://github.com/cetz-package/cetz) works quite well
| and is comparable to tikz in complexity and capability. of
| course, there is more support for tikz, but it is bound to
| improve over time.
| meatjuice wrote:
| 1 and 2 are already in the typst ecosystem. What you really
| need is a professional account as CERN member,on Typst.
| tapia wrote:
| If you make a lot of slides with latex, then it is definitely
| worth it to try typst. I have a lot of presentations in latex
| for lectures and such things, with many animated tikz figures.
| But the compilation times are huge. At some point it is very
| time consuming to iterate. With typst, it compiles so fast that
| you don't have to fear to start a compilation. I finish my
| presentations much faster now.
|
| Cetz has been working very good for me. I was really unsure
| that it could replace tikz for my applications. But apparently,
| as long as you have good geometrical primitives (lines,
| rectangle, circles, etc) you can do a lot. Also it is much
| nicer to program and make real functions with typst. It is
| true, the typst options to replace beamer are still not quite
| there in comparison, but they are definitely in a very useful
| state. See for example typst-presentate [1].
|
| [1] https://github.com/pacaunt/typst-presentate
| Bromeo wrote:
| One thing I'm missing when making slides with typst is the
| ability to show short videos or animated gifs. Although to be
| fair this isn't easy in beamer either.
|
| Typst can actually include gifs, but they don't move for me.
| I have some hopes that perhaps one could make slides straight
| in html which could alleviate the issue.
| spidersouris wrote:
| Maybe you can use Touying Exporter:
| https://github.com/touying-typ/touying-exporter
| johnofthesea wrote:
| > [1]
|
| There is one example with Fletcher... I find these also nice:
| https://typst.app/universe/package/fletcher
| spidersouris wrote:
| To add on what's been said already on slide decks, another
| great slide creation package in Typst is touying[1]. I've used
| it to create my own academic theme[2] for courses or conference
| presentations.
|
| [1] https://touying-typ.github.io/ [2]
| https://typst.app/universe/package/touying-unistra-pristine/
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| It was easy for me to roll my own slideshow tool in Typst. I
| would have never attempted this in LaTeX.
|
| Can't respond to 2 or 3. Used tikz once. I wish there were a de
| facto programmatic drawing tool (I usually resort to graphviz
| or matplotlib), but there are a bunch of 80% solutions.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm super happy that Typst continues to chip away at LaTeX's
| dominance. Kudos to the team and contributors! <3
|
| This looks like a great release. Lossless embedding of PDFs seems
| like it would be useful in many scenarios. I'm surprised with how
| much better the character-level justified text actually looks.
| And I wasn't even aware that it supported exporting HTML. Typst--
| both the tool and the language--are more robust and enjoyable to
| use IME than something like Markdown, Pandoc, Org mode, and other
| formats, so I'll definitely consider using it for my next web
| project.
|
| My only concern is backwards compatibility. How committed is the
| team to supporting older syntax? What will happen in a year or
| two from now when I have to generate a PDF from a .typ file
| written with version 0.13? They mention deprecations in v0.14, so
| I assume that I should expect breaking issues. I suppose only
| time will tell how difficult upgrading will be in the future.
|
| This was a big problem for me when using LaTeX, which is why I
| maintained a TeX Live Docker image with the exact version and
| dependencies I needed. Upgrading it was always a nerve-racking
| ordeal. Since Typst is a single binary, this should at least be
| easier to manage.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| I don't know what their official policy is on breaking changes,
| but packages published via Typst Universe[1] are versioned, and
| you specify the exact version you want when importing a package
| in your document. So while you may need to install an older
| compiler (which is a single, self-contained executable), I
| don't think that you'll have to worry about your dependencies
|
| [1] https://typst.app/universe/
| DNF2 wrote:
| As long as Typst is on version 0.x,you should probably expect
| breaking changes. There is talk about changing even part of the
| parsing rules.
|
| This is the risk of being an early adopter.
|
| Once v1.0 is out, I hope it will stabilize for the long term.
| velcrovan wrote:
| I think by the time Typst has been around for as long as the
| half-life of a major LaTeX release it will be pretty stable.
| (Only 12 more years to go!)
| seanwilson wrote:
| > To make sure you got everything right, you can enable the new
| PDF/UA-1 export. PDF/UA is an international standard that helps
| to create universally accessible PDF files. When it is enabled,
| Typst will run additional checks against your document to find
| accessibility issues and optimize for accessibility rather than
| compatibility. It will find issues such as missing document
| titles, wrong heading hierarchies, and missing alternative
| descriptions.
|
| This sounds great! Are accessible PDFs possible with LaTeX? Last
| time I looked, it wasn't a standard feature and there didn't seem
| to be any easy workaround which is a real problem when there's a
| requirement to produce accessible PDFs.
| cbolton wrote:
| LaTeX has made great progress on this front in the past years
| and results are now available in TeX Live 2025. Compared to
| Typst, on one hand the tagging is still opt-in [1]. On the
| other hand, LaTeX already targets PDF/UA-2 including automatic
| tagging for math formulas, while Typst currently targets
| PDF/UA-1, so you have to tag the math formulas manually, like
| an image. This is evolving fast though: yesterday a draft PR
| for Typst was opened[2] to add support for MathML Core, which I
| guess is a big step towards automatic tagging of math since the
| math tags in PDF/UA-2 are based on MathML.
|
| Another thing to consider is compatibility of third-party
| packages: LaTeX packages often require adjustements and many
| important packages work now but many still don't work,
| including some big ones like Beamer and tufte-book [3]. I think
| Typst packages should require fewer adjustments, thanks to the
| way "show rules" work: a package (or the user) can write a show
| rule to transform an element for rendering, but Typst
| automatically retains the semantic meaning of the original
| element.
|
| [1] https://latex3.github.io/tagging-
| project/documentation/usage...
|
| [2] https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/7206
|
| [3] https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/tagging-status/
| decatur wrote:
| We used GitHub/Azure markdown plus Mermaid plus MathJax for
| financial model documentation. Beyond a certain complexity this
| really hurts.
|
| Now we use typst, both playground (which does not call home, so
| no document exfiltration) or the compiler. The compiler is super
| easy to install, as we already have the Rust build chain
| installed. Compared to Tex, the 40 odd years newer design of
| typst makes all the difference.
| pbronez wrote:
| FYI - Typst will sell you a self-hostable version of the
| webapp.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Typst is great. I'm ditching Asciidoc for writing specifications.
| No more terrible Ruby, wahoo!
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Typst is fantastic, I like it a lot (and have used LaTeX for over
| 30 years). I hope they keep up the great work!
| k__ wrote:
| Is this like DocBook/ASCIIDoc?
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I tried Asciidoc for a bit (as a replacement of Markdown,
| because I wanted/needed more than Markdown).
|
| While asciidoc hasn't matched my expectations (went back to
| Markdown), Typst has.
| pbronez wrote:
| Yeah. I went down the rabbit hole with ASCIIdoc several years
| ago. I was looking for a text-only way to write complex
| documents like contracts with lots of nested sections and
| internal references. Markdown wasn't enough. ASCIIdoc was a
| solid language, but the ecosystem was too weak to commit to.
|
| I'm taking another run at this with Typst. I'm getting a lot
| further!
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I used to use markdown with embedded LaTeX and pandoc for
| scripting. I hated the stack, it was really hard to write custom
| functions.
|
| Since switching to typst my happiness with my writing tools
| improved dramatically.
| hbn wrote:
| > alt: "Diagram with two rectangles. The first is labelled
| 'Tagged PDF'. An arrow points to the second, labelled
| 'Accessibility'"
|
| Not trying to make any statement but I'd love to see how this
| level of alt text detail scales to a diagram that's more than a
| rectangle pointing to a rectangle
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think a simpler text would be better and less tedious for
| anyone in the document's audience, something along the lines of
| "box 'Tagged PDF' to box 'Accessibility'"
| tobwen wrote:
| The accessibility support (PDF/UA-1) is VERY nice, but there's
| still still a lot of work to do (-> tables).
| maxc01 wrote:
| Wondering how this compares to Emacs org mode, which support
| exports to PDF slides with beamer or plain PDF document, also
| support to export to lots of other format. It also allows running
| the embedded code and export the results. Of course embedding PDF
| is easy.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Slightly related:
|
| https://github.com/jmpunkt/ox-typst
|
| In case you want to use both org mode and typst.
|
| (Haven't tried it out).
| WillAdams wrote:
| Anyone using this for Literate Programming?
|
| A quick search found:
|
| https://github.com/litProgTypst/ (which I'm mystified by)
|
| and
|
| https://github.com/denkspuren/typst_programming (which hasn't
| been updated in two years)
|
| Not seeing anything specific at:
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/scripting
|
| I need to re-write my current project
| https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview again --- maybe this
| would be a good fit? The unique feature I am taking advantage of
| is writing out code blocks in separate files, then concatenating
| them using .lua so there's no differentiation betwixt
| tangle/weave, both happen, and since it's Python, no need for a
| compile step either.
| default-user wrote:
| Would https://quarto.org/ fit the bill?
| WillAdams wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| I looked at it a while back and will check it out again.
| amai wrote:
| Have a look at
|
| https://typst.app/universe/package/soviet-matrix
|
| This is a classic Tetris game implemented using Typst!
| amai wrote:
| There are already some Tufte-inspired templates available for
| Typst:
|
| https://typst.app/universe/search/?q=tufte
| commandersaki wrote:
| I write this in pretty much every Typst thread.
|
| Here are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when
| comparing with LaTeX and some recent additions:
|
| 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.
|
| 2. Compiling is instant.
|
| 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust
| compiler suggestion style).
|
| 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1],
| [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring
| to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating
| long item entries is much easier.
|
| 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify
| macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify
| the macros close to where you need them. [I've been informed this
| is actually incorrect and Latex does allow you to specify macros
| anywhere]
|
| 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use
| semantic line breaks.
|
| 7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc.,
| footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.
|
| 8. Compiling with Typst is always one pass.
|
| 9. I'm not sure how this would compare with Latex but I'm
| starting law school in a month and I need to cite using AGLC4
| which has a CSL (citationstyles.org) template supported by Typst;
| I have confirmed the CSL XML is correct but doesn't render
| properly in Typst. The workaround I found was to hand typeset my
| own citation and bibliography which sucks.
|
| 10. Most of what you need is built in to Typst and I've yet to
| need to import a package or template; even for the most basic
| documents with Latex you find you'll need to use many packages
| (such as fancyhdr for customised headers and footers).
|
| 11. Latex distributions can be a monstrosity, gigabytes in size
| like TexLive, and I acknowledge you can get slimmed down on-
| demand version such as Miktex. There's just one distribution of
| Typst and its pretty lean, although it might be nice to have
| multiple implementations in the future.
|
| As for Typst 0.14 - I'm really happy about Accessible PDF feature
| and HTML export, will give each a whirl.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| > It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling
|
| This was a question [0] I asked on stack overflow more than 15
| years ago, and is to this day the most up votes I've gotten on
| SO. I still get notifications from it occasionally.
|
| [0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/11123/prevent-
| pdflat...
| weinzierl wrote:
| 12. It isn't a ticking time bomb with untrusted input.
| idoubtit wrote:
| When I compile LaTeX files, I use tectonic1 which automatically
| download dependencies, compiles in one pass, and hides
| temporary files. But the regulars users of LaTeX I know all use
| a web interface -- IIRC, it's an instance of Overleaf2
| installed by their university, with real-time rendering.
|
| So when I read your list, I had these tools in mind, and the
| only items that made sense to me were:
|
| 2. (minor compared to Overleaf) typst compiles faster.
|
| 3. Diagnostics are better.
|
| 4. (minor and arguable) Lists have 2 simpler syntaxes.
|
| The other points were irrelevant (dependencies), wrong (macros)
| or really dubious (margins, Git, bibliography). I think Typst
| has many more interesting features over LaTeX.
|
| 1: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/
|
| 2: https://docs.overleaf.com/on-premises/installation/using-
| the...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| tangent: what syntax lets you use superscripts in HN
| comments?
|
| test^1
| mayoff wrote:
| Unicode superscript characters.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supers
| c...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| aha, thanks!
| commandersaki wrote:
| Yeah fair enough, people have different experiences.
|
| I would like to address that you read my point for
| margins/footers/etc. being difficult in Latex is dubious.
| (Also not sure why you mention the bibliography thing as
| dubious as it was a real issue of Typst, but _shrug_.)
|
| A few years ago I spent many hours trying to figure out why a
| fancy footer wasn't rendering in a Latex document. I wanted a
| Page x of y counter in the footer which requires a few extra
| packages. So I try adding it, using two different methods
| \fancyfoot and \cfoot that I found on StackOverflow &
| OverLeaf, yet neither worked. I thought I was doing the
| incantations incorrectly. Spent endless hours figuring out
| what was going on, until I broke down and created a minimal
| example by selectively removing stuff which helped uncover
| that it was rendering but off page. The culprit was an overly
| large \fancyfoot that I hacked in to give a long baseline
| because I wanted to use up a huge chunk of the page due to
| Latex generous margins.
|
| Yes I got things wrong, but Latex really didn't make this
| stuff _easy_ , and took many hours to troubleshoot -- though
| it did improve my Latex troubleshooting skills.
|
| In contrast setting layout parameters such as margins and
| specifying a footer is effortless in Typst and doesn't have
| that footskip footgun (at least I didn't encounter it):
| #set page( width: 210mm, height:
| 297mm, margin: (top: 15.875mm, bottom: 25.4mm,
| left: 15.875mm, right: 15.875mm), footer: context
| [ #set align(center) #set
| text(size: 10pt) Page #counter(page).display()
| of #counter(page).final().first() ] )
|
| Anyway, that's my justification for that point.
| DNF2 wrote:
| > 2. (minor compared to Overleaf) typst compiles faster.
|
| I would argue that this isn't minor. At least in my opinion,
| it makes a big difference.
|
| Overleaf, already 3 pages into a document, with a couple of
| TikZ figures, was getting slow, as in multiple seconds wait
| for each save.
|
| Typst, on the other hand (Tinymist in VS Code) is really
| realtime. Text updating within some tens of milliseconds, and
| figures included in far below a second. It really _feels_
| instant, and to me that changes the experience a lot.
| raybb wrote:
| Have only lightly dabbled in latex but Typst was super easy to
| pickup. I recently even published a whole book[0] in Typst. The
| process was straightforward for the most part. It took a little
| time to work out how to get page numbers alternating between
| the left and right side and a few other small formatting
| details but by and large it was very easy to create a beautiful
| PDF that's ready for printing.
|
| Also, pandoc has fairly good support for Typst so I use that to
| create a docx (which Draft2Digital converts to epub). I even
| opened a few issues
| (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues?q=sort%3Aupdated-
| desc%2...) for pandoc support and they were almost all resolved
| pretty quickly.
|
| [0]: https://thelabofthought.co/shop/p/nbmi3
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| It really is so much better than LaTeX. I'm only saying this
| because I really enjoy using it. LaTeX was always tweak
| something, wait for the compile, and pray that it works,
| without having any clue about what was happening.
| mcny wrote:
| I want to express my gratitude to the typsr team and congratulate
| them on their release.
|
| I got started with typst because I wanted to put my resume in a
| got repository, for no reason other than to learn git.
|
| One day I want to write a crosswords document using typst. I
| don't know how yet because I can't get my tables to be squares
| but one day... (:
| laughingcurve wrote:
| I love typst and I tried to use it recently when shipping
| publications to EMNLP, AAAI, and NeurIPS. While there were a lot
| of upsides to it, things got very bad when the teams grew beyond
| just a few people. Typst is incredible for single-person or a
| trio of people, but the web experience is not there yet for
| collaboration. I'm really hoping for typst to continue and I plan
| to use it whenever I can for smaller projects or stuff that wont
| involve working with professors or students who are not
| interested in learning new things during publication time.
| vhartman wrote:
| How did you deal with the usually supplied templates that you
| get for TeX? Did you just try to imitate as best as possible?
|
| (I wanted to look at this at some point for replacing latex for
| submissions to IEEE confs/corl etc)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393842 - Sept 2025 (384
| comments)
|
| _I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44350322 - June 2025 (328
| comments)
|
| _Typst 0.13 is out now_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105444 - Feb 2025 (60
| comments)
|
| _TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43032697 - Feb 2025 (38
| comments)
|
| _Using Pandoc and Typst to Produce PDFs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42271078 - Nov 2024 (19
| comments)
|
| _Typst 0.12 is just... better_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41888107 - Oct 2024 (4
| comments)
|
| _Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821361 - Oct 2024 (235
| comments)
|
| _Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941 - July 2024 (187
| comments)
|
| _Typst - Compose Papers Faster_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422 - Nov 2023 (134
| comments)
|
| _I rewrote my CV in Typst and I 'll never look back_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224 - Oct 2023 (25
| comments)
|
| _Typst: Finally a Solid LaTeX Alternative_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835703 - May 2023 (3
| comments)
|
| _Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open
| source_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 - March
| 2023 (146 comments)
|
| _Typst: A Programmable Markup Language for Typesetting [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590 - Jan 2023 (53
| comments)
|
| _Typst: Compose Papers Faster_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209794 - July 2022 (30
| comments)
| lava_pidgeon wrote:
| Living in a Berlin you encounter founder and CS people on funny
| occasions. So after starting using Typst I met one founder in an
| university dance course. Every time Typst is mentioned on HN,
| I've to recall that dance course.
| ivape wrote:
| Dude was definitely marketing Typist at the dance course.
| That's hustle.
| gglitch wrote:
| It's indexing with imakeidx that's keeping me on LaTeX. Does
| anyone know offhand the state of indexing with Typst?
|
| https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Indexing
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| With a quick search I can see that the `in-dexter` package [1]
| provides something quite similar, though I'm not sure if it
| covers all usecases.
|
| If you want to handroll this yourself you can probably have
| your `index` emit some `metadata` [2] which you can then
| `query` [3] for in your `printindex`. All of this would work
| inside the typst compiler and there would be no need for
| running an external `makeindex` command.
|
| [1]: https://typst.app/universe/package/in-dexter
|
| [2]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/introspection/metadata/
|
| [3]: https://typst.app/docs/reference/introspection/query/
| gglitch wrote:
| Thanks. My search found that also, but it didn't appear to
| have the features I need, at least not at the time. If LaTeX
| becomes vexing enough, I'll consider the custom workflow
| you're describing. Thanks for the tips.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| This name really should have been work shopped before being
| chosen. This and 'slint' should get together and figure out
| better project names.
| AAAAaccountAAAA wrote:
| One of my biggest grievances with typst is that it still does not
| natively support locale-aware decimal separator formatting[1],
| and thus requires various kludges to present decimal numbers
| properly in non-English languages. Not that LaTeX is any better
| in that, though.
|
| I think this should be solved quicker, because if it requires
| some sort of changes to syntax, we will have problems if the
| "legacy" syntax becomes entrenched, so this sort of decisions are
| better to be made sooner than later.
|
| However, most my experiences with typst have been highly
| positive. It is much, much faster than LaTeX, and way easier. I
| am looking forward to see it to become more common.
|
| 1) https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093
| b33j0r wrote:
| Yeah but can it run doom
| jeremyscanvic wrote:
| I've been really pleased with Typst so far - fast rendering, less
| verbose than (La)TeX in many ways (backslashes hurt now!) and
| unicode/emoji support really seals the deal. (Disclaimer: only
| using for semi-formal slides and notes, not for papers and
| important presentations)
| qjh wrote:
| I really wish I could use Typst, but to be honest, it doesn't
| work with any journal I know of, let alone arXiv. It feels like a
| chicken-and-egg problem to me; I can't see most people who use
| LaTeX moving over unless journals and preprint servers adopt it,
| and I can't see journals or preprint servers adopting it unless
| people move over. Still, it's early days, I and wish the
| community good luck and I genuinely hope that one day I can ditch
| LaTeX for something markdown-like.
| l9o wrote:
| Yeah, from discussing this with friends in academia it seems
| like this is the biggest hurdle at the moment. Someone on
| Reddit reached out to arXiv [0] and their response was very
| negative towards it, which seems unfortunate:
|
| > At this point, we're more likely to add support for .docx
| than a markdown language.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1ddlgvg/arxiv_just_a...
| qjh wrote:
| I've seen that too, yeah. It's unfortunate, but also
| completely reasonable; docx is actually surprisingly common
| outside of physics, maths, and CS, and it is almost
| surprising that it's not supported since OOXML an open format
| now.
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| After over a decade of occasionally updating that one ancient
| .docx file, I recently rebuilt my CV/resume using typst and it's
| been a really fun project! My resume is now a private repo with
| my personal, career, and styling data stored in TOML files. Then
| I can pull any interesting typst resume templates, populate the
| information from the TOML files by looping over arrays of
| jobs/projects, and populate it into the doc template. It's
| absolutely overkill but it was a fun project and I really enjoyed
| working with typst. Didn't even do a tutorial, just threw myself
| into the language and assumed it would be intuitive enough with
| some examples and it absolutely is.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| Did you use an existing package or did you write something from
| scratch? I'm also looking at rewriting my CV in Typst, though
| the fact that I am happy with my current job means that it is
| not a very high priority task
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| I used existing templates from the [typst universe
| repository](https://typst.app/universe/) for the resume then
| built something much simpler from scratch for a secondary
| document, a sort of cover letter/case study of projects I've
| done.
|
| If there's interest I can maybe take some PII out of my repo
| and make it public. Not like there's anything wildly private
| in there, would just prefer to not get any more spam calls
| than I already do.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| You don't have to go through the effort for my sake. I was
| mainly interested in hearing if you had recommendations
| with regards to existing packages, though there's a decent
| chance that I'll just end up creating something from
| scratch
| clarkmoody wrote:
| I recently jumped into typst for creating a course syllabus to
| learn programming. The experience has been great, especially
| compared with the LaTeX memories from grad school.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-24 23:00 UTC)