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Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex

• wiihack 2y ago
  I use Typst every day for my work. It is great software.
• sivsivsree 2y ago
  Been using this for a while for all my organization documentation, helps me keep the consistency and identity among the peers.
• sprinkly-dust 2y ago
  Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like. In comparison to LaTeX, overall document typesetting is far more straightforward. However, for long multi-page stretches of equations solving, I feel that LaTeX is easier to type than Typst because its syntax is not that of a functional programming language but more akin to markdown. Thus, one does not need to think as far in advance when typesetting equations with lots of functions, superscript, and subscript.
  • crngefest 2y ago
    As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?
    • ksynwa 2y ago
      It depends on what you are doing with your markdown files. For example, if you are using them as the source for a statically generated website typst won't do much for you.
    • PartiallyTyped 2y ago
      You have more control over the style and structure. If you use markdown + css, that's a different story.
      • crngefest 2y ago
        Yea that is my setup right now. I write markdown and use eleventy + nunjucks templates to build the final result. It’s pretty easy to create new layouts and styles for really any use case with that setup in minutes.
        • PartiallyTyped 2y ago
          If that's the case, I don't think you will get any benefits by switching to Typst.
    • WolfOliver 2y ago
      With or without equations, just use MonsterWriter. It gives you LaTeX results without needing to know what LaTeX is. But, yes LaTeX has other benefits, e.g. citing references, or creating PDFs according to layout and typesettings best practices.
      • m_kos 2y ago
        MonsterWriter is your product, correct?
      • adwn 2y ago
        It is customary to add a short disclaimer when you're promoting your own product or project.
      • WolfOliver 2y ago
        Yes it is my own product. Sorry for not pointing it out.
    • beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
      I would say probably not. Markdown is really more about getting words down in plain text with a very simple structure for rendering on the web. Typst and LaTex make stark distinctions between composing and typesetting. They are programmatic typesetting systems with very structured and fine grained control over the look and design of a document once it's compiled and rendered as a PDF. If all you're doing is writing prose then I honestly think typesetting programs are overkill unless you do want very fine grained control over how your documents look.
    • Winsaucerer 2y ago
      You've had some good replies already, but just want to add my thoughts. Markdown to me is more about (a) the content (the actual words) and (b) the semantics (text emphasis, headings, etc, which communicate information about the importance or meaning of particular things). Typesetting systems like Typst or LaTeX go beyond this. They're also about presentation, how precisely it is laid out, on mediums such as print or PDF. Is that something you need? If you care more about the content and its meaning, and are happy to have it rendered differently in different situations (a preview in Visual Studio Code, or passed through a markdown-to-html renderer, or viewed in Obsidian, etc), then Markdown might not just be fine, it may be preferable. But if you need to do things like print this on paper for mailing, email in a PDF, that sort of thing, then you'll want something more.
      • thangalin 2y ago
        A few Markdown documents I've converted to PDFs: * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf * https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/technical.pdf https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/technical.pdf * https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/jekyll-hyde.pdf https://whitemagicsoftware.com/softcover/jekyll-hyde.pdf Respectfully, keeping presentation logic and content completely separated while having precise control over layout can happen with Markdown, as the example documents demonstrate. The ConTeXt typesetting system makes keeping such separation possible. The deeper issue relates to the software's architecture, which, IMO, systems like Typst, Obsidian, and others fail to generalize broadly enough. Here's KeenWrite's architecture (the "Proposed" row): https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/raw/main/docs/images/architecture/architecture.png https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/raw/main/docs/imag... Although only Markdown is currently implemented, it's possible to plug other text-based input formats to produce an XHTML document. The instructions for how to typeset XHTML documents are defined by a theme. You can think of a theme as an XML to TeX translation layer. From there, going from XML to TeX is straightforward (when using ConTeXt, at least), allowing full control over the final output format (be it PDF, ePub, and so forth). I am the author of KeenWrite. The following tutorial shows how its themes work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30&list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzPIoWZMKu_&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QpX70O5S30&list=PLB-WIt1cZY...
    • constantcrying 2y ago
      Typst deals with documents, so if you want to prepare an actual document, with a defined page layout, style, font, etc. typst gives you that. Markdown does not do any of that, it just gives you html. You would want to use typst if you want to create a document and need to control how that document looks from the language itself. Even if you were to render the markdown html to a PDF, markdown itself, or even css doesn't give you control over many parameters of the output document. There basically is no competition between the tools, they target different output formats.
      • aragilar 2y ago
        I've done .doc -> .md -> .tex -> .pdf via pandoc (e.g. to convert a confluence document to a nicely typeset PDF), so I'm not sure there's much difference. Naturally, a format with more metadata loses metadata when converted to one with less (and the reverse, you may need to add metadata in when going up the chain), but unless your document is bound to a specific format (in which case, I'd pick RST for HTML and LaTeX for pdf), markdown gives you the content and pandoc lets you specify a template (and with pandoc, you can take the markdown and generate slides in HTML, PDF and create notes through the different outputs).
        • constantcrying 2y ago
          Conversions don't just loose metadata, you loose the ability to specify things. LaTeX shines because it can do everything by itself, markdown clearly can't and even with a TeX template you loose much of TeX's power. You should start out by defining your desired output and needed input. I realize that 99% of document content can be fully realized in markdown, but the 1% can easily be a total deal breaker and make using markdown a complete nonstarter.
        • wlievens 2y ago
          Markdown doesn't give you a table of contents, an index, page breaks, control over typesetting, control over table layout, captioned figures, diagramming tools, etc. The difference is about the same magnitude as between Pong and Call of Duty. Yes they're both video games, sometimes one is preferable over the other, but they are not equivalent.
    • tengwar2 2y ago
      What are you doing with Markdown? My own requirements for a format are: * 30 year viability. * simple but explicit formatting: I need to specify font size, underline, and red text. * clarity in writing is almost as important as clarity in reading, so I am not fond of formatting directives mixed in with text. That led me to RTF, since Markdown fails on the second and third point, and LaTeX fails on the last. But you have to determine your own requirements from your use case.
  • gumbojuice 2y ago
    Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that, journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges to LaTeX/Word would fall in place. For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source). Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles to LaTeX.
    • tapia 2y ago
      The only thing I need to start writing more serious documents with Typst is an equivalent to latexdiff. But I really think (and hope) that this will replace latex in the future. Alone the compilation time makes it so much nice to use! Meanwhile I am supporting them by having a pro account, which is not even so expensive.
    • 2cynykyl 2y ago
      Arxiv will accept a rendered pdf, no source files required. Are any special features unlocked if source files are uploaded?
      • CJefferson 2y ago
        They autoconvert latex to html. Typst can't currently produce html output.
        • wiktor-k 2y ago
          Just for completeness the html export issue is here: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
        • Onawa 2y ago
          Quarto can convert to typst, html, and LaTeX through pandoc.
    • AnonymousPlanet 2y ago
      Typst is missing vital features to produce professional looking documents. Latex and Adobe InDesign use paragraph based algorithms for line breaks and hyphenation (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380111102 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380111102 for Latex). That is the main reason why papers written in Word look so amateurish. Proper support for footnotes seems to be also lacking in Typst. Footnotes might be handled properly in a future version of Typst. Regarding paragraph formatting I'm not so optimistic. I've read the thesis and papers by one of the Typst authors. They either don't seem to be aware of better approaches or they simply don't care about aesthetics. Edit: Another thing that irks me about Typst is that it does not seem to be a purely not-for-profit project. It is tightly entangled with their commercial offering, whatever that might mean for the future of the "free" version.
  • thomas34298 2y ago
    FWIW there is already partial LaTeX support for Typst via the mitex package: https://github.com/mitex-rs/mitex https://github.com/mitex-rs/mitex
    • returningfory2 2y ago
      This is interesting! However, I suspect general TeX support in Typst is probably impossible unless you re-implement the entirety of TeX within Typst somehow. The TeX language has some really terrible properties. For example, the tokenization rules can be dynamically changed at runtime based on the output that has already been produced. E.g. you can write a TeX file that says "typeset this paragraph, and if the result is an odd number of lines, change the meaning of A from letter to open brace". Thus, fully supporting TeX within Typst would seem to require making all of the internals of Typst available to the TeX runtime.
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    • aragilar 2y ago
      Is that just common constructs, or can I pull in amsmath and other similar packages?
• mkl 2y ago
  A number of past discussions and related things: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=typst https://hn.algolia.com/?q=typst 1 year ago, 146 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 8 months ago, 34 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422 2 years ago, 53 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590 2 years ago 30 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209794
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • PhilippGille 2y ago
    And this new post likely triggered by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41006565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41006565
• pocket_titan 2y ago
  I've been finding Typst a great tool for ~90% of my use-cases — in the other 10%, I'll still reach for LaTeX for the extra power (tikz, pdf images, tagged pdfs (!) (this is becoming more and more of a requirement when publishing/submitting academic texts, and AFAIK Typst does not support it yet), but that's okay. Excited to see where it goes, as LaTeX is very beginner unfriendly and I'd love to see the barrier to entry for typesetting lowered so my more non-technical friends can share in the power of pretty texts & CVs.
  • joooscha 2y ago
    At least for a tikz equivalent, I found cetz [1] to be very useful. I am not sure how it compares feature-wise. But I could easily build some graphs with it. The one thing that really makes me excited when using Typst is that I find it very intuitive, meaning the time between not knowing how to do a certain thing and me being pleased with the result is much shorter with Typst compared to latex. [1]: https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz/ https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz/
• Neywiny 2y ago
  This feels like a mix of markdown readability with latex control. I'm not sure yet that I need that middle ground. Currently I'm doing docs in markdown, reports in Python generated tex, coupled with hardcoded preambles. That seems fine so far.
• fhd2 2y ago
  Seems like it's not built on top of LaTex, so you presumably can't drop into LaTex when Typst can't do what you need, or did I just miss that? LaTex is positively arcane, but I still use it for all my writing since it's so incredibly versatile: Academic papers, letters, contracts, forms, invoices, tons of packages, pretty easy to apply regional standards, ... How I manage to not go insane is Org Mode: I can write almost everything in something similar to Markdown but do inline LaTex as needed (since it compiles from Org to Latex to PDF). I find that incredibly powerful.
  • mr_mitm 2y ago
    True, it can't fall back to LaTeX. It's not there yet, but give them some time and there won't be any cases that Typst can't do that LaTeX can. It's already impressively close if you ask me.
  • arnsholt 2y ago
    The genius of TeX is that it’s a programming language for document production, that can mostly look like markup. The further genius(?) is that the language works in such a way that you can do more or less arbitrarily complex things, while still exposing an interface to the user that feels like markup. This makes for a language that is sometimes, honestly, completely bananas. But when wielded correctly, it’s great.
    • SkiFire13 2y ago
      Typst is also a programming language for document production, however they made the decision to make the code side an actual scripting language, which makes writing custom logic much easier than in Latex.
• mr_mitm 2y ago
  I can't wait for LaTeX to go away in favor of Typst. The experience is night and day. Very impressed with their work. I've been using Jinja2 templates to generate TeX files, but Typst can take a JSON over the command line and is easy to use and powerful enough that I can completely remove the Python step. Not to speak of the compile time that is measured in milliseconds.
  • Winsaucerer 2y ago
    Yes, the scripting is very nice. At first, I played around with Go templates to generate the Typst templates, since that is what I was used to doing with LaTeX. It was very nice to discover it allows you to use JSON with its scripting engine directly pretty easily.
• Ilasky 2y ago
  I love Typst. It’s especially good for dealing with programmatic input as the —input flag can take json. [0] Then, in the file it’s easy to get the json with the dedicated json.decode() function. Super easy to get solid results. Swapped to it from LaTeX in my own project [1] [0] https://typst.app/docs/reference/foundations/sys/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/foundations/sys/ [1] https://resgen.app https://resgen.app
• MaxBarraclough 2y ago
  I'm surprised to see that HTML output is currently in progress, and was not a core feature from the start. [0] LaTeX's awkward relationship with the web seems like something a competing greenfield project would try to nail right out of the gate (to mix metaphors painfully). [0] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
  • Kinrany 2y ago
    Someone mentioned that pandoc works decently for this.
    • alphabeta2024 2y ago
      It does not.
    • ykonstant 2y ago
      I am using pandoc to transfer some of my notes to the web: https://ykonstant1.github.io/power-draft.html https://ykonstant1.github.io/power-draft.html
      • nicf 2y ago
        I've been doing something similar, and it looks like you've managed to solve a problem I've been unable to: how did you get theorem and section numbering to work right?
        • hgyjnbdet 2y ago
          Not the OP but I use pandoc-crossref for this: https://lierdakil.github.io/pandoc-crossref/ https://lierdakil.github.io/pandoc-crossref/
        • ykonstant 2y ago
          Nothing special; here is the pandoc command I use to transform tex without tikz: for input in *.tex; do pandoc "${input}" \ --from latex \ --to html \ --pdf-engine=latexmk \ --css="styles/texstyle.css" \ --standalone \ --mathjax \ --toc \ --number-sections \ --output="${input%".tex"}.html" ; done My pandoc version is: pandoc 3.1.9 Features: +server +lua Scripting engine: Lua 5.4
• renerick 2y ago
  I make TTRPG character sheets with Typst. No only they look great with perfect page layout, the programming capabilities allow to compute everything from ability scores automatically, like Excel. It's really well designed, and fast too, VS Code integration just works (for me at least)
• kkfx 2y ago
  LaTeX is not just a set of macros over TeX to produce (nowadays) some pdf, it's a very big library of ready-to-use packages for pretty anything, that's VERY hard to "substitute". You want inspiration for some strange table layouts? There are gazillion ready made; some graph? TiKz/PGF have gazillions of ready made examples... Want a programming language in the middle? Python, Lua etc can be embedded straight away. So far I've seen few tentative to "replace or hide LaTeX", from the old DocBook to ConTeXt, no one succeed simply because of all the LaTeX already made and easy to import. Having alternatives, especially seen the actual "fragmented" development is nice, but honestly I doubt it can take off. Proprietary products are fast to wane in popularity if a serious competitor pops up because the users does not own them, FLOSS are much calmer since anyone can grab a piece and integrate ideas of someone else without the need to switch.
  • kleiba 2y ago
    Exactly. It's not too difficult to imagine replacing LaTeX for some fairly straight-forward documents. But just by casually browsing tex.stackexchange.com, you'll soon find out that people use LaTeX for an amazingly wide range of different things, and it's capable of serving many, many edge cases very well. To be on par with that is a very hard goal. Let's not forget, LaTeX has been around forever, and consequently has grown into an incredible complex and varied ecosystem.
    • jonnycomputer 2y ago
      I mean, the same is true for Emacs. But that hasn't stopped other editors (e.g. VSCode) from developing large vibrant communities of users and tooling.
      • JohnKemeny 2y ago
        But Emacs isn't a requirement by half the STEM research community, LaTeX is. Typst is not replacing LaTeX in general and should stop advertising being a LaTeX replacement. It isn't a competitor.
        • 2y ago
• mr-karan 2y ago
  Typst has been pretty amazing, and at my organization, we’re very happy with it. We needed to generate over 1.5 million PDFs every night and experimented with various solutions—from Puppeteer for HTML to PDF conversions, to pdflatex and lualatex. Typst has been several orders of magnitude faster and has a lighter resource footprint. Also, templating the PDFs in LaTeX wasn’t a pleasant developer experience, but with Typst templates, it has been quite intuitive. We’ve written more about this large-scale PDF generation stack in our blog here: https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes
  • sitkack 2y ago
    What is the use case for generating that many PDFs?
    • mr-karan 2y ago
      Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India are required to generate this document called “Contract Notes” which includes all the trades done by the user on the stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this has to be emailed to every user before the next trading session begins.
      • bjourne 2y ago
        There are of course way more efficient methods for generating templated pdfs than using a typesetter.
        • cameroncooper 2y ago
          I'm interested to hear what you would propose.
          • abound 2y ago
            Not sure what GP had in mind, but one can programmatically generate PDFs directly, without using something like Typst as a "middleman".
• humanfromearth9 2y ago
  So, anyone using it?
  • renerick 2y ago
    Hypermedia.Systems does - https://dz4k.com/2024/new-hypermedia-systems/ https://dz4k.com/2024/new-hypermedia-systems/ https://hypermedia.systems https://hypermedia.systems
• bucephalos 2y ago
  Nowadays, I use Latex mainly for letters using the great KOMA package. I wouldn't mind switching to a markdown based system for that. Would Typst work to produce DIN format letters?
  • mr_mitm 2y ago
    Yes: https://typst.app/universe/package/letter-pro/ https://typst.app/universe/package/letter-pro/
    • bucephalos 2y ago
      Awesome, thanks!
• ThinkBeat 2y ago
  Where does it get its font from?
  • chambored 2y ago
    I believe you can run a command to point its font options to a directory.
  • flokl 2y ago
    It uses your system fonts, additionally you can use a cli option to point Typst to a folder to read ttf or otf font files.
• pgen 2y ago
  I personally prefer ConTeXt (https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone). It's comparable to LaTeX, but better in my opinion.
  • nanna 2y ago
    I could never get my head around the use case for ConTeXt. It seemed like LaTeX minus defaults that have been defined by typographers and the massive ecosystem. Care to say more?
• karencarits 2y ago
  I guess this is a competitor to services such as overleaf [1] and codimd [2]. Although this is yet another syntax, it seems to be supported by pandoc [3]. Lately, I have been using Quarto [4] more and more as I program in R, which also produces very nice outputs, especially HTML. But none of these solve the academic usage problems of (1) producing nice diffs for reviewers, and (2) can easily be shared with, and commented by, non-technical collaborators. Thus, I fear Word will be difficult to replace for many years, at least in my field, for scientific writing [1] https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf [2] https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd https://github.com/hackmdio/codimd [3] https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output.html https://pandoc.org/typst-property-output.html [4] https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/
  • countrymile 2y ago
    I've been using quarto a lot too. I've found the typst pdf travel output to be a bit rougher than latex pdf when using GT. Hopefully something that will get fixed.
• Aerbil313 2y ago
  I'm a college student and I use Typst in school all the time. I know I should just use Google Docs/Sheets, but because it's code instead of a WYSIWYG editor it's very easy to create reusable and consistent styles for reports and presentations, and saves time on the long run. (I use polylux module for slides.) Once you get past the learning curve (10-15 hrs if you nosedive) it's incredibly easy to create professional stuff.
  • spidersouris 2y ago
    touying[1] seems quite great to create slides too. [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/touying/ https://typst.app/universe/package/touying/
• xyst 2y ago
  This is very easy to use compared to latex. My latex resume (or the template I was using) was thousands of lines and had several imports of custom classes. Re-did my resume using one of their templates, and it’s much easier to maintain now.
• rochak 2y ago
  Have been using it for a while. Can’t overstate how much better the experience has been compared to LaTeX. As someone who had to use LaTeX not out of choice, I’m so grateful this exists so that I can no longer bother to decipher the mess of LateX.
• spacebuffer 2y ago
  This is very interesting, seems to be like LaTex + a whole lot more. I need to generate udemy-style certificates for a project I am working on. are there any guides on generating PDFs with typst?
• byteplane 2y ago
  I’d be happy if this takes off just for the fact that their default typeface (or at least the one shown on the website) is so much better than “Computer Modern”!
• anserin 2y ago
  The main problem I have with Typst compared with LaTeX is that it doesn't handle basic fine typographic features, such as the different types of spacing in mathematical mode (mathop, mathbin, mathrel, etc.) or the size of delimiters (big, bigg, etc.)
  • StableAlkyne 2y ago
    It also seems to have problems with accessibility, based on this thread - https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/133 https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/133 But then again, apparently so does LaTeX
  • xkevio 2y ago
    Am I misunderstanding what exactly you are looking for? You can change the spacing in math mode of symbols/operators with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/class/ https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/class/ and delimiter size with https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/lr#functions-lr https://typst.app/docs/reference/math/lr#functions-lr (or automatically).
    • anserin 2y ago
      I didn't know about math classes, thank you for the reference The issue I have with delimiters is that there is no option for "big", but only for "140%" or whatever, making it harder to be consistent Someone created an issue on this on GitHub if I remember correctly And automatically chosen sizes are often too large
      • laurmaedje 2y ago
        Good point! lr should support lengths in addition to ratios. Should be easy to add.
      • xkevio 2y ago
        Ah, yeah fair enough! I was confused thinking that you were unaware of the existence of the functionality as a whole. Well, as laurmaedje (one of the main devs) said below, it should be easy to add, though it seems difficult to find which size values `big`, `bigg` and so on exactly represent.
• amai 2y ago
  Quarto already supports typst: https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst.html https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst.html
• amai 2y ago
  Unfortunately out of the box typst is missing an important layout features compared to Latex: the auto-generation of headers (showing the section name in the header). There are some packages that help you with that: - https://typst.app/universe/package/hydra https://typst.app/universe/package/hydra, - https://typst.app/universe/package/chic-hdr https://typst.app/universe/package/chic-hdr - https://typst.app/universe/package/wonderous-book https://typst.app/universe/package/wonderous-book However I believe this functionality should be available in the typst core.
  • fbdab103 2y ago
    Practically nothing in Latex comes out of the box. Sure, you can bang out markdown-esque formatted text, but the moment you need something more complicated, say URLs, graphics, resize the margins, etc you are likely going to be pulling in a package. No true scotsman and all that, but I suspect few documents in the wild are bare Latex.
    • amai 2y ago
      But the feature I'm talking about comes out of the box. One just writes \documentclass[twoside]{article} \pagestyle{headings} in LaTeX. And this also does the right thing on special pages like table of content, appendix, bibliography etc. Implementing all that in Typst is quite a hassle.
      • delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
        The 'La' in 'LaTeX' stands for 'Lamport'. Leslie Lamport set up additional macros atop the base TeX language to make life easier. To this day LaTeX code can still be compiled with `pdftex` (note, no 'la' there). The `article` document class is actually some `article.cls` file that resides somewhere in your TeX install root, is loaded, and implements macros such as `/title`, `/section`, `subsection`, and so on. All LaTeX eventually expands into a pile of TeX macros that are evaluated. All this is to say... LaTeX comes with the templates, you've been using one all this while.
• kerkeslager 2y ago
  This is the sort of thing that I'm excited about because it solves problems I have, but can't really use for much because I'm not sure if it will exist in a year.
  • notpushkin 2y ago
    I mean, the compiler is open source, so if you download it it will exist (even if no new features / bugfixes are released).
    • kerkeslager 2y ago
      Maintaining this project myself would cause me more problems than it solves.
• trostaft 2y ago
  I'm following the progress of this package, I would not mind a more modern successor to LaTeX. I'm an academic, and I actually do not mind LaTeX. I find actually writing LaTeX to be fairly natural. But every time I come to the programmatic interface I feel like there's a lot of room for improvement and that's the most exciting aspect of typst. I cannot, reasonably, start using this for work until journals begin accepting papers in the format. But I am following until either that starts happening, or some workaround exists.
  • fastasucan 2y ago
    Have you tried out Quarto?
    • chambored 2y ago
      I’ve been using Quarto for a few years now. It’s quite a breeze to use. Highly recommend to anyone looking to publish technical writing on their static site.
• __mharrison__ 2y ago
  I would love to replace latex but I only use it for making physical books and none of the replacements have the features needed...
  • rossant 2y ago
    Which features?
    • __mharrison__ 2y ago
      Generally things like front matter, footnotes, callouts, tables, figure captions, index entries, code formatting. I don't remember which of these Typst didn't support when I last checked it out.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Duanemclemore 2y ago
  Oh it's pandoc compatible which means my favorite LaTeX trick is possible - writing in an IDE then using pandoc to convert to icml for linking inside InDesign.
• hgyjnbdet 2y ago
  I saw this come up today in a different thread. I'm a mature undergrad, I've never used LaTeX, actively avoided it in fact and am forced to produce word documents. My current workflow is pandoc style markdown and obviously pandoc for conversion, with zotero for citations. I make use of pandoc-crossref for figures, tables, sections, etc. I'm hopefully moving to a different uni for a masters this year. Can anyone who uses typst comment on whether I should consider moving from my fairly complicated workflow to typst?
  • bitvoid 2y ago
    You may be limited for your thesis. My grad program required us to conform to either a Word or LaTeX template, of which I found the latter actually much easier to deal with. I just kept my chapters in separate files that are inputted into the template. If you're asking for other assignments, I'd actually recommend Quarto [1]. It's basically a streamlined version of your current workflow. The other benefit is that it can convert your markdown to Typst if you decide to switch over in the future. 1: https://quarto.org https://quarto.org
• mohamez 2y ago
  The best thing about Typst is that it's intuitive.
• zmmmmm 2y ago
  We use a custom tool that bases everything on markdown for this type of thing. It also integrates Jupyter notebooks. It is mostly very effective but the limitations of Markdown certainly grate. Having said that the best thing by far is that it's automatically viewable in Gitlab/Github in source form. This doesn't look like it would fare all that well.
• aragilar 2y ago
  Does this have support for macros? It doesn't appear to, and so feels a bit like another variant on markdown (with its own special syntax)? It's not clear to me why I'd use this, compared with RST (where I can generate LaTeX or HTML, and script with python)?
  • nmca 2y ago
    It has functions which replace macros. One would use it instead of latex because it is immeasurably faster and more sane.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    No, it has no macros, that is its greatest selling point. Instead you can use an embedded programming language which will look familiar to anyone who has some experience with software development to script it. Replacing TeX's abysmal macro expansion language with a reasonably normal programming language is one of the reasons you would use it. Look at the example on their GitHub to see how the language works in a document.
    • aragilar 2y ago
      I take it you don't write much maths then? Most of the macros I define are to make the process of writing maths faster, easier and more correct (common expressions become short macros, macros for specific semantics etc.), and the lack of amsmath-equivalent means that Typst loses out on a major part of its audience. The "reasonably normal programming language" part is a turn-off for non-software-devs, and for software devs I'm not sure why I wouldn't generate LaTeX via something like jinja2, or directly create PDFs with reportlab.
• ARandomerDude 2y ago
  This looks really great and I'll give it a try. I keep thinking, however: My guessed probability that LaTex is free and maintained in 15 years: 99.9999% My guessed probability that $OTHER_NEW_TOOL is free and maintained in 15 years: 5%
  • viraptor 2y ago
    The curse of early-and-good-enough systems. It's the same for bash and a few other things. Not enough pain points to replace them even though there's lots of better alternatives.
    • jltsiren 2y ago
      The curse of support. If you need something that will be supported for the next 20/30/50/100 years, you pick an already established product that is widely used and does not depend on any single organization. You can't rely on volunteer projects, as volunteers have no duty to maintain and support the product. And you can't rely on anything made by a single company, as companies lose interest and die all the time.
      • mr_mitm 2y ago
        LaTeX's support is already problematic. Most people just don't use it in sufficient intensity to notice. We produce thousands of (mostly) custom written technical reports a year using LaTeX and there are all sorts of subtle issues cropping up. It's a distribution (edit: or at least texlive is) of many, many packages from many developers, and maintenance can be spotty and vary. Unlike some people would like to believe, stuff breaks all the time. Check this out for example: https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu This used to be the most recommended package for tables. This bug is still not fixed after at least 9 years AFAIK: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203629/longtable-and-floats-wrong-table-breaks-on-pages-with-floats-part-2 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203629/longtable-and... It affects us regularly. I'm not even going to comment on the fact that all of the following packages provide some sort of tabular feature: array, table, tabu, tabular, tabularx, longtable, supertabular, longtabu, xltabular, lxtable, booktabs, tabularray, ctable. Good luck figuring out which one does what you need and has the least side effects with everything else. Also, while I'm not familiar with the internals of the LaTeX project, I keep reading the same names, most of which appear to be getting closer and closer to retirement. I wonder if suitable successors will pick up the task of maintaining LaTeX in the future.
• drsopp 2y ago
  From the first example, I don't understand from the syntax why the first formula becomes inlined while the second one is centered on the page.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    It's the space after and before the $. A bit weird I guess, but I think it makes some visual sense.
• hgyjnbdet 2y ago
  Quarto appears a popular alternative, out of interest is anyone using Zettlr? https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/
• 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  Can I use this to generate PDF invoices from PHP? I've been searching for a good solution for the past 15 years. Never been happy with the solutions, and my PDFs are always very ugly.
  • tehbeard 2y ago
    Used it in a recent PHP project, only real caveat/issue I ran into is you can't pipe out to STDOUT on windows: Wrapper class I wrote to handle it: <https://gist.github.com/tehbeard/a54a2c77b4b8bf1af26920ce7a7f347b https://gist.github.com/tehbeard/a54a2c77b4b8bf1af26920ce7a7...>
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
      That's awesome, thanks! I need to print big tables of data though, I remember hitting limits before when I've tried to pass too much as shell args.
      • flokl 2y ago
        Then a slower but similar simpel option could be to write your data to a json/csv/xml file and read it directly with Typst.
• Shorel 2y ago
  Two things interest me from this project: More templates than LaTeX. I have made PDF presentations in LaTeX, which look good, but they all look the same. Some variety is good. Unicode chars support. I prefer to type α instead of \alpha. That's it, both things together will make a LaTeX killer for me.
  • enriquto 2y ago
    > Unicode chars support. I prefer to type α instead of \alpha. This is not done by default by LaTeX, but if you can bear to \usepackage{unicode-math} then it's readily available. A life changer! Regarding presentations, what do you mean exactly? There are a lot of weirdly different beamer themes. You can even put a single verbatim block inside each slide and you'll just have a "text mode" presentation, if that is your thing.
    • Shorel 2y ago
      Thank you about the unicode-math package. I will surely use it. About the presentations: All beamer themes look similar to me. Open PowerPoint template gallery to see how different the designs can really be!
• summarity 2y ago
  I can't get past the sign-up form: "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable"
• uger 2y ago
  I love Typst for text and equations, but I find that it is taking me time to adapt to their table syntax and be able to make tables similar to booktabs. I'm hoping that Estout or Modelsummary will be able to write Typst tables with complex formatting soon.
• jbd0 2y ago
  Seems like a pain to install. I'm looking forward to this being packaged for Debian.
• isatty 2y ago
  Disclaimer: I haven’t tried the syntax but it doesn’t scream “easier” to me. Latex doesn’t either. Plus this doesn’t seem to compile down to latex so I also lose the engine. From experience, latex makes beautiful documents and choices which I’ll always prefer over ease of use.
• thefringthing 2y ago
  Just don't try to put a footnote in a heading. I'll keep using LaTeX until Typst is less buggy.
• ttul 2y ago
  Working as an intern in 1999, I was tasked with writing a standards document for VoIP telephones for the TIA working group working on this space. The standards organization had a Word template that everyone used, but as an engineering student, I had been working with and loving LaTex for some time and so naturally I thought… “why not just use LaTex? The final output will be in PDF anyway and the formatting will be better.” The LaTex output was indeed better. My boss loved my work and had no idea that I wasn’t using Word. Feedback from the working group members was also positive. Wow, this kid has real talent! As a startup, making a positive impression on the giant companies represented in the working group was extremely important for the future of the company, if not its survival. Unfortunately for me, one day my boss said, “could you send that Word doc over to big-whig so-and-so at massive-company-we-might-be-acquired-by? They want to use it as a template for a new document they’re writing.” I got that sinking feeling similar to when my mom found out my friend and I had peed in my closet as an experiment at age four. I then hired a friend to work all weekend painstakingly rewriting it in Word. Boss man got the document. Company was acquired for $100M 18 months later. Either way, LaTex still looks 1,000x better than Word.
• owenpalmer 2y ago
  This is a Typst + Neovim live preview project: https://github.com/chomosuke/typst-preview.nvim https://github.com/chomosuke/typst-preview.nvim It looks similar to Gilles Castel's famous note-taking setup: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ I would love to see someone combine this with Anki for quick math flashcard creation