Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

With the wisdom from a TU Delft graduate student, I switched from Word to LaTeX in 2007, having never known or used it ever before, and never looked back for the next seventeen years. Using it within the corp. environ. (Shell) became progressively harder as time went by due to the need to install such a large installation (under Cygwin, which itself got on the list of not-allowed, and had to resort to `setup-x86_64.exe --no-admin` for nearly all my subsequent time there).

While I appreciate LaTeX structure, and the resulting end product (Knuth is God), it is as you know highly verbose in markup, thereby making the content somewhat unclean, and not easily readable like plain text (my yardstick on content readability and re-usability). I wrote multiple plug-ins for the text editors of my choice Sublime Text, and Vim to produce snippets for writing ease.

- https://github.com/ckunte/latex-snippets-st

- https://github.com/ckunte/latex-snippets-vim

Switched to Typst cautiously in 2023, and have never since looked back. If LaTeX was the gold standard for the 20th century, I think Typst is on track to become that for the 21st.

I wrote a little note about writing a template for Typst to remind myself how-to, and for anyone I'm working with:

- https://ckunte.net/2025/template

I wrote my PhD thesis in Typst last year. I also had to clone my university’s template (available here https://github.com/fdekerme/PhD_template_UPSalcay), but the process was fairly straightforward.

I’d say 99% of the experience was super smooth. It was a great decision, though risky as you mentioned—I started with Typst 0.11 and finished with 0.12. The only painful part (that last 1%) happened at the very end when I realized my university only accepted PDF/A (the archival version—I didn’t even know there were different PDF versions before this). While Typst 0.12 theoretically supports generating PDF/A-2b files, the output failed the university’s compliance test. I ended up (after MANY experimentations) using Adobe Acrobat Pro to convert the file, which caused some minor layout adjustments unfortunately.

Apart from that, I highly recommend Typst. It’s an excellent tool, and I hope academic journals will soon accept submissions in this format.

Proper as in widely adopted as https://ctan.org. Yes, great to have package manager. Typest is a very young project and company.

LaTeX is a wonderful tool.

The only real complication comes from the multiple packages (a novice doesn't know what are the standards), and from the big installation, it's really frustrating, it is something from 40 years ago.

I use http://www.overleaf.com, which works nicely, although the size of each tex is limited by the compile time.

AFAIK, Typst doesn’t handle multilanguage documents well, and hyphenation in particular. I had to go back to XeTeX because of this.