Typst killed the invoice industry
How so?
Because it turns pdf generation into a programming language, hence you can automatically generate invoices with little hassle.
Typst 0.15.0
81–90 of 96 posts
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#82I'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with. I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mo…
I’ve been using Typst pretty heavily for the past few months after a few years of LaTeX, and I’ve had a similar experience. I do really love Typst though. It feels nimble, pleasant to work with and like a huge improvement over LaTeX in a lot of ways. That said, LLMs have been noticeably better with LaTeX than with Typst for me. Typst works fine for the basics: loops, functions, small layout tweaks and that kind of th…
And yet you probably understand Typst better than you ever understood LaTeX...
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#83As a non-developer who really only uses computers to write and produce documents, why would I use typst over org-mode or $your_fave_markdown + pandoc?
Use it with markdown/pandoc. That's what I do for my books...
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#84Reminder that it's 2026 and batch-mode typesetting seems an oddly low bar for what we can get from a computer. Tree-structured documents in a live (WYSIWYG) typesetter with a programmable editor are possible, as is demonstrated by https://texmacs.org ( https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html if you don't have it installed).
“batch-mode typesetting seems an oddly low bar for what we can get from a computer.” I don’t know what this is intended to mean. “a live (WYSIWYG) typesetter” I don’t like this mode of interaction. No, thanks. Typst is fast enough to provide a live preview, and I can use Vim or any editor I want, along with my choice of PDF viewer.
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Re: Typst 0.15.0
#85Is there anything similar to (or better than) overleaf for collaborating on typst docs? To be clear, overleaf isn’t all that great but I sometimes work with groups that are used to it. Have conferences that traditionally accepted latex source (and specified latex templates) started accepting typst as well?
> Have conferences that traditionally accepted latex source (and specified latex templates) started accepting typst as well?
I wouldn't count on that happening any time soon. LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX have been around since ~2008, are 95% backwards-compatible with classic LaTeX, and are significantly easier to use in many circumstances, yet most journals/conferences still only accept documents compiled with pdfLaTeX.
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#86Apparently Typst isn't supported by many journals, forcing LaTeX usage, anyone have experiences with this situation?
Yep, usually what people do is import the template into Overleaf and work on it from there. It's only when journals and conferences will provide typst templates is when we will see wider adoption for writing papers
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#87Typst also has native scripting! For fun, I've been working on a small statistical distributions library in Typst, distro[^1] that uses plain Typst.
It's really nice having a decently powerful scripting component, it makes for some fun literate-style programming. You can package things up pretty easily for others to use, too[^2]. It even supports WASM plugins, if you want to go wild.
This package, conch[^3], renders a mini OS and terminal, based on Typst:
> A shell simulator that renders interactive terminal sessions in Typst, powered by a Rust WASM plugin.
> Type shell commands in your Typst document. Conch executes them against a virtual filesystem and renders a realistic terminal window — complete with colored output, syntax highlighting, and animation support.
[^1]: https://github.com/stochastical/distro
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
Typst and its json based templating makes it easy to create good looking invoice PDFs for free. The open-source solutions we tried before were annoying (Used LaTeX, wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint in production and evaluated several more). To avoid that pain we asked some commercial PDF generator software for a quote, but their per document pricing was insane.
Typst is a really good fit if the layout model works for your invoices and you want to keep it self-hosted. I’m building PDFBolt as a hosted api, and pricing was one of the first things I wanted to keep simple. For invoices and other recurring pdfs, I think teams mostly want to know what the monthly cost will be, not do math on every render
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#89How's Typst with tagged PDF (particularly math in tagged PDF)? Recent LaTeX versions started to be able to do it, it'd be a shame if people started switching over just when LaTeX finally started pulling their accessibility act together.
Typst tags by default, which is more than LaTeX can say. But LaTeX supports automatic tags for math which is huge. There's good progress on this in Typst (this release just added MathML support for HTML and MathML is also the basis for automatic math tags from what I understand) but it's not there yet.
Re: Typst 0.15.0
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
"LLMs struggle with Typst a bit" My experience is the opposite. Especially when instructing the LLM to do very fine grained and detailed adjustments. Works like a charm. Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.
I had the same experience as the root commenter. Sometimes ChatGPT seems to generate invalid typst code that doesn’t even compile. Maybe the syntax changed and it did work at some point but some stuff looked so wrong that I would guess it just doesn’t have enough training data for proper typst generation without feeding examples into the context first.
I have the same experience with ChatGPT, but Gemini works very well and produces valid code and good results even using plugins (i.e., diagramming)