71–80 of 390 posts
I've ditched Pandoc + Latex for Typst for a book [1] that I'm writing. Typst is as easy to write a Markdown, and so much easier to program than Latex (though it is still a bit rough in some places). In Latex I would have to rely on a slew of packages to get anything done, and then work around their quirky interactions. With Typst it's feasible to just write it myself. It's also really fast and doesn't poo all over th…
Our previous pipeline was LaTeX-based (first pdflatex, then lualatex), but we were constantly fighting cryptic memory errors on large documents and huge Docker image sizes that slowed down boot times of our ephemeral workers.
Switching to Typst was a massive win for us. The single static binary resulted in tiny images and faster boot times. More importantly, the performance gains were huge. Overall compile times were ~3–4× faster than LaTeX. On really large documents (2000+ pages, mostly tables), Typst compiles in ~1 minute vs. ~18 minutes with lualatex.
Beyond performance, the better developer experience and good error messages was a nice bonus too.
We wrote a detailed post about the entire architecture - from the job orchestration with Nomad to the S3 optimizations and the Typst migration in particular. If you're curious, you can read it here: https://zerodha.tech/blog/1-5-million-pdfs-in-25-minutes
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.
I guess if Pandoc adds Typst output support I will consider using that, but "LaTeX replacement" sounds like something that is too low level to consider for most usecases? It was many years since I used LaTeX for anything other than at most short snippets embedded in other documents (e.g. md or org). Or would Typst replace something like Pandoc Markdown (with a long list of supported output formats and a convenient Lu…
I moved from Pandoc+Lua filters to Typst. Having the scripting language integrated is just nicer, though I sometimes miss the separation between data (from Pandoc markdown) and code.
Only paid version has "private packages".
Like other academics, I plan to stick with latex for journal articles and books, unless publishers provide support for typst.
Markdown still has a place for files on github, because that means that web browsers will display formatted material, not just the raw code. A similar thing applies to code documentation, with many systems (R, Julia, etc) supporting various flavours of markdown.
I recommend typst to students for small tasks like assignments. It offers more typesetting power than markdown, it's a great replacement for msword, and it's easier to learn than latex.
Long story short, typst fills a niche. But it's not the be-all and end-all, at least in my (natural science) field.
It has a paid version, which frightens me that future greatness of the software and eco-system may be over-shadowed by greed and control. Only paid version has "private packages".
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.
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…
You footnote really describes why latex was not fine. I recently wrote a thesis in typst. I have written other thesis in latex. In latex i actually wrote in markdown and compiled to latex. I don't need that for typst. If typst can avoid enshittifaction over the next years, then I will stay with them.