I've moved all of my LaTeX-based content creation to Typst.
It's:
- Fast—Compiling my books would take around 1 minute (I often had to compile twice due to indexing). With Typst, it takes less than 5 seconds.
- Easy to write—I actually don't write it, I wrote a bunch of Pandoc plugins to tweak the output from Pandoc (I write all my books in Jupyter these days, so lots of markdown).
- Easy to read—I've used LaTeX for years (and wrote a bunch of tooling around it) and still couldn't tell you when to use a { or a [. Typst is very readable.
- Easy to script—Okay, I did write some Typst the other day. I migrated my LaTeX-based invoicing system to Typst. I created a list of objects with pricing and count and was able to throw it into a table easily. It has less code than my LaTeX version, which was using a library, and is easier to read. (I did need to write a function to properly format $ because that doesn't exist. A few rounds with AI made that easy.)
- Has great error messages—If you've used LaTeX, you know what I mean.
My needs are different from others, but I'm writing PDFs that need to be printed into a real book that looks professional. This includes front matter, footnotes, callouts, page numbers, page headers and footers, and indexes. I don't do a lot of math-heavy stuff, so I can't comment on that. And the widow/orphan support is a little weak.
Otherwise, I'm happy to never use LaTeX again!