Is it as good for generating EPUB or HTML for instance? Or just plain text?
I use it to generate PDF. The last release introduced experimental HTML output which is promising but still immature. Work on EPUB support hasn't started as far as I know but it's on the roadmap, and I guess it will be relatively easy once the ongoing work on HTML and accessibility is done.
Sounds like it may eventually turn into an interesting replacement for Pandoc then, but I will stick to the latter for now.
Typst is just wonderful, I hear maths majors now procrastinate on thesis writing by writing typst packages instead. Give it ten years and see how it developed. Pros: - Instant compile. It just sits there waiting, and once you save your .typ, boom, your .pdf is ready. - Surprisingly often I find myself using it as markdown replacement, e.g., for random meeting notes. Syntax is as easy as markdown and without boilerpla…
In my experience, the hiccups with packages are of a different kind than those with LaTeX packages. They’re more often “normal programming” hiccups where a function is poorly-documented, or there’s simply a bug. LaTeX packages can cause bigger problems: even usepackage-ing them can do arbitrary ‘stuff’ and have weird nonlocal effects that are basically undebuggable. Oftentimes two packages will just be incompatible, which should not ever be the case in a sensible programming language.
I love Typst! Currently rewriting my CV in Typst and it has been an excellent experience. One small hindrance is the inability to have multiple bibliographies.
In the past I have also used it to generates quotes (in terms of finances, invoice etc.). It was neat because all of the logic for adding up the subtotal was written in the language (and was fairly easy to understand). I can imagine trying to do that logic in LaTeX…
8. Programming with it is lovely. Its got a little interpreted language built in, with helper functions like json("some_file.json"). I wrote a paper in it, and used that extensively to populate all my result tables. (Benchmark script -> JSON files -> typst compiled the results directly into the PDF).
As you wrote a paper, how difficult would you say is it to recreate the template of the venue you submitted to?
I haven’t explicitly recreated a template for an academic venue, but I have recreated a custom template to match and existing PDF. It was pretty straightforward to recreate it as the language and “standard library” (if you could call it that?) is well designed and has excellent documentation.
It's great to see Typst getting more visibility. We migrated a real-world workload to it a couple of years back: generating and e-mailing 1.5M+ PDFs daily at my org, Zerodha. 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…
I am using a LaTeX pipeline for creating text, invoices, forms, etc. from snippets stored in a database. It was quite complicated to set up, but the results are very satisfying. In principle, I would like an easier markup language, but am afraid to wast my time trying out something new, just to run into limitations after awhile. Here are my most important requirements: Multiple columns configurable for meaningful col…
Now, this isn't really an alternative, but I can recommend using pandoc instead of pure LaTex. Personally, I think text blocks are much easier to handle and read in markdown and pandoc allows you to use in-line LaTex wherever markdown is insufficient, without making basic text styling unnecessarily verbose. In my opinion, the result is a better/friendlier LaTex, or limitless markdown respectively. Especially for writing papers and such, you can always start actually writing in basic markdown, which is trivial and almost-WYSIWYG, and later worry about presentation. In my experience, with pure LaTex you easily get lost in sidequests and it's much harder to get into a writing flow and find your way around your own words in the editor.
Typst seems like an improvement in many respects, but I definitely prefer LaTeX when working with detailed math equations (most of my use of LaTeX). I think there is a lot of inertia for anything to replace LaTeX for mathematical research.
These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX: 1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling. 2. Compiling is instant. 3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style). 4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vi…
Oh wow, I was hopping something would come along with better friendlier errors like modern programming languages