Live data from Hacker News

Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

lwn.net

61–70 of 390 posts

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#61
I just gotta ask: what’s this trend of tech blogs to appear like 90s html? No typographical rules whatsoever, basic colours with outrageous contrasts.

Does it make the blogs look more edgy and geeky? Is it a an artistic trend in web design?

I’d love some insights from someone with a better sense of the situation

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#62
post #44

Another unpronounceable project name. Well done.

Straight forward if you ask me: > /taɪpst/. "Ty" like in Typesetting and "pst" like in Hipster. https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#pronunciat...

Huh, I was reading it as “typist” all this time (and will probably continue).

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#63
Nobody seems to be taking about how great typst is to use programmatically. It’s absolutely trivial for example to build a Lambda function that parses some json input into a PDF. We’re using it to generate PDF invoices for our customers. We save massive amounts of compute because of how fast typst compiles into the PDF.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#64

Typst is great for web content as well (even though their HTML export functionality is still experimental). I've written blog posts on interaction nets in Typst [0] and I really like how the diagrams look. [0]: https://ezb.io/thoughts/interaction_nets/lambda_calculus/202...

I rewrote my website to use typst for all the content and I really like how it is to integrate as well, its just a rust crate that I use in my build script because Typst is just on crates.io

https://erk.dev/2025/04/19/bureaucracy

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#66
post #61

I just gotta ask: what’s this trend of tech blogs to appear like 90s html? No typographical rules whatsoever, basic colours with outrageous contrasts. Does it make the blogs look more edgy and geeky? Is it a an artistic trend in web design? I’d love some insights from someone with a better sense of the situation

according to Wikipedia, the blog was launched January 29, 1998

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#68
post #26

I have written a couple of lecture notes in LaTeX and I wrote my master's thesis (mathematics) in LaTeX as well[1]. It's actually a fine language if all you want to do is write and rely on other people's templates. But actually writing my own package or understand how the underlying systems work has always seemed like black magic where individual packages have to avoid stepping on each other's toes, or add specific w…

I also have written. thesis in reStructuredText and used Pandoc to make a latex file and then latexmk to make a PDF file from it. I also used matplotlib and Python to make PDF plots, which I then could losslessly embed into the main document.

Was there anything that you were not able to achieve with reStructuredText? I am not aware of any limitations, because you can use latex in your Pandoc template and reStructuredText is very powerful to begin with, compared to most if not all Markdown dialects for example. I think it might have been easy to continue writing reStructuredText, instead of latex.

Re: Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

#69
Typst seems to be the product of a commercial company - fully controlled by it. That's not appropriate as a foundation for document authoring by "the public".

I am also worried about the rust-centricity, seeing how rust is somewhat of a moving target.

Post reply on HN