Typst: A Programmable Markup Language for Typesetting [pdf]

The program for it seems to be the one here https://typst.app/

Their supporting code is available on github and it is all in Rust.

https://github.com/typst/

Impressive, as a Master's thesis, but also as a long-term project.

I've been recently working on a book project, and I've reviewed all the tools available. My current conclusion is that I found nothing that would combine the simplicity of Markdown or Asciidoc with the typographical control of LaTeX.

This project seems to hit the sweet spot.

Is the source code of the thesis available somewhere? Of other works created with Typst? That would help making a more educated bet.

Edit: this doesn't seem to be an open source project. So not what I'm looking for.

Hey, I'm the author of the thesis. Thanks for the kind words! Just wanted to let you know that while Typst isn't open source yet, we are planning to open source it in March. We will also make a free CLI tool available as to not lock anybody into our web app.

There isn't much Typst source code out there yet, but you can find some examples and discussion on our Discord server [1] and in our documentation [2].

[1]: https://discord.gg/2uDybryKPe

[2]: https://typst.app/docs/

I really like the paper, though I'm not sure the world needs another Turing-complete document language however well-motivated ;)

As SGML pedant however, I can't resist commenting on the following:

> The second offspring of SGML is XML, specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1998. It has a reduced feature set compared to SGML (for example, it forbids unclosed tags and concurrent markup). But it retains the most important aspect of SGML, one that HTML is lacking: The ability to define custom structural elements. This lets XML represent documents with much more semantic detail than HTML.

As the SGML vocabulary HTML was once envisioned, HTML itself doesn't need extensibility. When used as an SGML application, defining your own elements in HTML is as easy as declaring those in the "internal subset" or in a custom DTD right away. Assuming any wellformed element is accepted as of ISO 8879 Annex K's FEATURES IMPLYDEF ELEMENT rather than rejecting undeclared elements, that's actually only necessary if you want to validate/infer custom content models, or use any of the other things markup declarations provide, such as custom SHORTREF syntax a la markdown.

Arguably, HTML5's "custom elements" do provide a facility to define new elements, if incredibly lousy; ie. custom elements can't have content model restrictions (see above) and can't be used with tag omission/inference (important for customized elements), aren't integrated with DOM parsing, and need JavaScript for declaration - the latter point making them completely pointless as a markup feature.