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)
Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#22Having 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 com…
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…
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.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#23I'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
Someone mentioned that pandoc works decently for this.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#24LaTeX 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.
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#25Typst 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
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#26Having 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 com…
FWIW there is already partial LaTeX support for Typst via the mitex package:
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#27So, anyone using it?
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?
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.
MonsterWriter is your product, correct?
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#29Nowadays, 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?
Re: Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex
#30So, anyone using it?
Hypermedia.Systems does - https://dz4k.com/2024/new-hypermedia-systems/