Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source

If you need to share a professional document that involves mathematical expressions and equations, LaTeX is very helpful as a tool to use. The need arises if you are a professional or student registered in a course in mathematics or computer science. It's much easier to type multiple lines of equations, with the equation signs aligned, in LaTeX than in Word.

It's a bit of a grind, but you can learn the fundamentals of LaTeX in less than a week if you have an hour a day. It was actually a requirement to learn LaTeX well enough to submit a basic report within 1-2 weeks, as part of a first-year computer science course at the University of Toronto.

The course instructors provided a basic LaTeX template (which included some instructions as a guide to how LaTeX worked), and also linked to free online tutorials for more in-depth instructions, which included LaTeX Tutorial from memory, at https://www.latex-tutorial.com . I wrote out notes from articles 01-09 and a few others on the website (as the other articles were less relevant to my purposes) to learn the basics, and then reinforced and developed my understanding of how to use LaTeX by writing future assignments in the course with it.

As an illustration for how LaTeX solves a nice problem, a recent popular submission on HN explored the complexity of typesetting a mathematical document (named "How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177110 . You might not have as much of a need to learn LaTeX if you don't regularly share lots of mathematical equations, but it's relatively quick to learn. LaTeX has also been quite useful to me for writing a professionally-formatted resume, which has been much easier to update than when I formatted my resume using Word.

You can develop muscle memory for vim, less so with LaTeX. Vim motions are absolutely worth learning, even if you don't use vim itself - it is the most efficient way to navigate and manipulate text.

So far, my favorite thing about it is matching parentheses scale automatically. No more \left(\right) nonsenses.

I'm not really into LaTeX but I am really into the specific problem of authoring documents with a certain (user-defined) look-and-feel by leveraging some (very user-friendly) DSL that is close to markdown but with more features

Does Typst support themes so that I can achieve that? Are there other tools I should be aware of?

Are there tools that do all of the above and have themes defined as CSS?

I'm aware of RMarkdown + Knitr which is a fantastic combo (and honestly my inspiration for digging into this problem) but that's obviously still too much "programming" for wider adoption

> However, it can be tough finding documentation how to use plain TeX.

I hate to be that guy, but... the TeXbook works and recently (finally!) had an official ebook release, illustrations and all. It’s a peculiar value of “works”—personally, I had to be stuck home sick for a couple of weeks with no reading material to get through it from beginning to end, it doesn’t really start to get rewarding unless you get through at least half of it or so, and I went away from it thinking that I like neither Knuth’s way of writing nor his approach to programming language design (“computers follow rules”). But it still has a lot of helpful stuff.

When it comes to more systematic descriptions and connections with more conventional programming-language ideas (it took me some time to recognize that TeX uses what is essentially dynamic scope throughout), I like TeX by Topic[1].

[1] https://www.eijkhout.net/tex/tex-by-topic.html