Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

593 pointsby judell7 months ago

44 comments

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!

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necovek7 months ago

References in established systems like LaTeX work the way they do for a reason: you don't want to embed words in them (like "Figure" or "Section") automatically because it does not work across languages.Eg. both the article and docs at <a href="https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/ref/" rel="nofollow">https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/ref/</a> use an inline reference that wouldn't work in Serbian.Serbian (and many other languages) have suffix declensions, so while "Figure 4" is "Slika 4", when used like "in Figure 4", you really need "u Slici 4" (and lowercase, really) instead of "u Slika 4" as produced by Typst.On the plus side, it seems to use OTF locl tables for substitution glyphs for language, though it only partially works for Serbian (might be due to bad locl tables for LinLibertine which seems to be the default font).I am sure it's not too hard to only get the reference number (eg. @foo.context.something?), but defaults should be good or maybe per-language?I can see how they wanted to avoid authors having to hard-code the reference type if they change eg. something from an image to a table, but it's hard to make it smart enough for any language.

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YmiYugy7 months ago

In the very limited time I used typst it has been pretty amazing, but imho there is one missing feature that a LaTeX successor, but even more so, templating engine should have. Come up or adapt a format, that can defer certain styling decisions to the consumer of the document. Stuff like, font, font size, line spacing, citation style, double or single column, numeration style, etc.On a different note, we got to find a better way to exchange data than pdf reports. In my totally made up estimation about 10% of development time for enterprise software is spend on variations of these pdf templating tools and another 20% on extracting data from such generated pdfs.

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vslavkin7 months ago

I've been looking into it. It's `blazingly fast` (aside from the rust joke, it really is way faster than latex), the syntax is more "modern", consistent, etc.The main problem is the popularity. It just does not have enough packages, at least for my use case.I mainly do a lot of equations (simple math), and a loooot of tikz (forest, circuitikz, pgfplots, etc.) [<a href="https://gitlab.com/vslavkin/escuela/-/tree/main/5to?ref_type=heads" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/vslavkin/escuela/-/tree/main/5to?ref_type...</a>] I'm not a fan of tikz, but it's the only way to mantain the graphics homogeneous, clean, easily editable, compiled with the document and with links/references. Cetz (the typst alternative) is years behind. I've been thinking of contributing, but tikz is really complex, and I don't have enough time ATM.Besides the typst packages, it also lacks the editor packages. I am an emacs user insert joke here, and I use AucTeX, which is a really great, and gigant package to edit latex (+cdlatex). AFAIK there's nothing like it for typst, which makes me way slower.Another thing is that they changed the math syntax. While the latex one wasn't perfect it was insanely popular, because of its use on markdown and a lot of pages (and this was thanks to mathjax iirc).The good thing is that something like latex or typst will always be needed, so there'll always people that want to have something like it; latex/tex isn't really great, and it has a really low entry bar.Maybe I'll switch when I have more time to study it and make packages. (It could be as soon as next year or a late as... never)

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elashri7 months ago

Previous discussions about Typst.<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941</a><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422</a><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224</a><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210</a><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590</a>

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alphazard7 months ago

This is neat. I've used Latex before, and it definitely suffers from poor ergonomics. Both the language and tooling contribute to this.The selling point seems to be that this is more similar to Markdown. That makes sense, Markdown is objectively more common and has more users than Latex. I've used both, but Markdown way more often.Here's something I don't understand: it would be trivial to make Typst even more similar to Markdown, and yet it exists at some strange middle point in the language design space, arbitrarily far from Markdown.

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knuckleheads7 months ago

Typst is a lot of fun and lets you do some really cool stuff. However! In the process of doing that cool stuff, you may need to debug things and that’s when it’s no longer fun. There is no way to print anything out to console and debug anything about what is going on. People have asked for it for over a year now and the authors have refused/ignored their requests. I would be using it a lot more except for this. <a href="https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1669">https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1669</a>

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viralsink7 months ago

I like Typst, but I've had a couple issues so far:1. The line spacing. It's not defined as baseline to baseline, but as the space inbetween two lines of text. Very difficult for an assignment with a prescribed line height since it usually refers to a baseline-baseline measure. 2. While having multiple columns is really easy, adding floating elements for the text to wrap around seems not possible. There's a reason all these CV templates have the info bar on the right instead of the left.

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bitexploder7 months ago

Built my resume with typst and know of several other folks using it for serious document typesetting. It is a very nice and modern typesetting system and language that just feels easy to make it do what I want.It incorporates elements like templates and it is very easy to create reusable content “functions”. It is everything I want out of LaTeX while being super fast and easy to use.Edit: pandoc can generate typst output if you want to explore :)

mbo7 months ago

First of all, I will commend the Typst community for attempting to rectify the trainwreck that is LaTeX typesetting. It appears that they have succeeded.So Typst has its own styling system, and its own scripting system, and plugin system via WASM... isn't this just HTML with extra steps? Not to mention that Typst doesn't support HTML export <a href="https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-1493319013">https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/188#issuecomment-14933...</a>, which is a major impediment to vision-impaired accessibility in the academic community.I think this is all a bit of a shame that there's been no major efforts to reform HTML as the go-to file format for scientific publishing instead. All the elements are there - <cite>, citation.js, KaTex, Web Components, good plotting libraries (Observable Plot), WASM. Was all this extra engineering effort required to get us a Markdown style syntax? I know people hate XML-based markup... but it's not _that_ bad, right?

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moelf7 months ago

the current show-stopper issue is that Typst can't insert PDF as figure[1], this makes a lot of scientific publication workflow impossible.[1]: <a href="https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145">https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145</a>

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hggigg7 months ago

While I appreciate these projects, I can't see any headway for something like this in our academic community. We have a very established ecosystem of LaTeX packages, styles and documents, some of which are more than 25 years old. Everyone knows it. Everyone collaborates with LaTeX. Knowledge is easy to pass on because it is well understood. Everyone knows (or are) the people who write the packages or maintain things behind the scenes. This is all quietly boiling away without a single thing on GitHub.To move to Typst, we'd have to start again and build all that again, because I guarantee there's stuff you just can't do it in it. I mean I looked at the options for tikz. One publication we have has 520 tikz figures in it for example. And that's dead.

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sega_sai7 months ago

I was hoping that the syntax for equations would be borrowed from LaTeX but it is not the case unfortunately. I would like to switch away from LaTeX, but i think the syntax for equations in LaTeX is pretty sensible actually.

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tcfhgj7 months ago

It took me a few hours to be able to do things I could never do in Latex, which I have had used for a number of documents like thesis, project reports, etc.In Latex I always relied on googling random packages to fix weird stuff while in Typist I feel like I can do anything I want myself. The scripting capabilities are powerful and compared to latex insanely easy to use.

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aragilar7 months ago

The two baseline criteria I have for better-than-LaTeX options are:1. Maths support equal to or better than amsmath 2. LaTeX-style macrosBoth are needed to make writing large amounts of complex equations acceptable.There should also be something similar to unicode-math, cleveref and biblatex, easy-to-use options to control layout/style/output (including metadata).

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daedac7 months ago

I've been using Typst for a while. It's a joy to write in but currently has very limited scope. There's a good summary of its current limitations here <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1ej07al/why_i_use_latex_instead_of_typst" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/typst/comments/1ej07al/why_i_use_la...</a> .For me, it's basically a non-starter for academic work because it doesn't support PDF and EPS images (there are currently issues with SVG too). They also have no plans to support PDF graphics (<a href="https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145">https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/145</a>).

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seanhunter7 months ago

I really want to like this because it seems a lot more accessible to folks than latex but I'm getting that "uncanny valley" feeling like when I look at equations that have been typeset in MS Word. They look almost, but not quite, good.Like if you look at the equation for Binet's closed form solution for Fibonacci numbers in the link below from their github, it looks to me like there is a bit too much space on either side of the plus sign in the equation for phi on the right hand side. And phi^n on the left-hand side looks too close to the 1/sqrt(5).<a href="https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17899797/228031796-ced0e452-fcee-4ae9-92da-b9287764ff25.png" rel="nofollow">https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/17899797/228031796...</a>

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perlgeek7 months ago

In the near future, I'll have to program the document generation part of an invoicing system.In the past, I've done generated PDF documents through latex, and didn't really like the process (for one, escaping is just so weird in latex, \ to \textbackslash for example).I've thought about generating HTML and using a headless browser that can produce PDFs for me, but I don't know how well you can e.g. control page breaks with CSS these days.Maybe typst is actually a good alternative here? Does anybody have experience with typst and multi-page tables?

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gxonatano7 months ago

Typst is a huge improvement over LaTeX, but makes the rather anachronistic decision to target paper-based media instead of screens. Unless you're planning to print out all your papers onto physical paper, and you have stacks of different sized paper lying around (A4, US Letter, US Legal, etc.), PDFs are kind of old-fashioned. Why constrain your document's width to eight and half twelfths of the length of some medieval king's foot, when we have cutting-edge 1980s technology like HTML which can adapt to your screen width?Incidentally, there's an open issue with Typst for making HTML output, but I don't understand why that wasn't the project's first priority. Even if scientific journals require PDF uploads, you can still get those from printing HTML. The opposite isn't true at all.

vivekd7 months ago

I've tried typsit and Ive really been enjoying it. It's very easy to learn and easy to use. It's a new project so it can't as of yet replace the functionality of LaTeX's many packages. However it is good for quick and easy texts, it's replaced markdown and office for me for writing simple documents on a computer.

vzaliva7 months ago

Slightly offtopic: many commenters lament that latex is slow. I switched to <a href="https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/" rel="nofollow">https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/</a> which is very fast and have better error reporting.

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tiffanyh7 months ago

My concern would be that this seems like such a niche market that only charging $8/month, raises long-term viability concerns.Last thing you want to do is use a platform that goes defunct.<a href="https://typst.app/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://typst.app/pricing/</a>

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cozzyd7 months ago

Until the arxiv gets typst support, I imagine this will get relatively little traction.

ThinkBeat7 months ago

What is the story with the fonts Typst uses? Does it come with a standard library of fonts?I am not a fan of LaTex myself, but I admire it to some extent.Other systems come along that are less verbose and easier to write, and faster. Yay.And then people use it, and then someone thinks "oh we should have this function", "We need to add a feature for it to work well" etc etc and slowly the system either bloats, and at some point, a person will look back at LaTeX and go"Oh that is why this existed, and ah that is why this is slow"Or one can choose to keep the new system simple and simply use LateX when something more is required.

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enriquto7 months ago

It's cute that you can write greek letters by spelling them, without any escape:<pre><code> pi, alpha </code></pre> What I'd really want to type is however<pre><code> π, α </code></pre> Will this work in typst? I had some trouble installing it.

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riedel7 months ago

First of all, today I almost exclusively write all my LateX in overleaf, so a lot of pain of LateX distros is taken away. But the main thing was always good templates, so I found a collection of ML conference templates [0], that shows also that typst still has some issues with acutely reproducing existing styles. Also when having to submit sources, I guess cross compile to latex would be the only possibility (typically they accept Latex or sometimes MS Word)[0] <a href="https://github.com/daskol/typst-templates">https://github.com/daskol/typst-templates</a>

divan7 months ago

I'm using Markdown/LaTex to PDF/HTML converter for preparing various legal/rules documents. While this approach works for very simple documents, whenever I needed simple change (i.e. specific list numbering or break the page for chapters) the path to find the solution was long and painful.Typst was a breath of fresh air, and I'm moving all my document generators to it and don't look back.The only thing I miss at the moment is generation of HTML (in addition to PDF). It's possible to achieve via Typst+Pandoc I guess, but would be great to have it as an output target natively.

HerrmannM7 months ago

I have a love-hate relationship with LaTeX... in 2016, I wrote my PhD with it, for wich I defined lots of helpers and commands.I used xetex for some obscure reasons I don't remember.The final result was beautiful but I dread opening any of those files. And it doesnt compile anymore.Among all the systems (tools, languages, devices...) I exploited professinaly, LaTeX is the one that remains the most obscure and frustrating to me. I'm not sure why.

puffybuf7 months ago

Latex already has massive amounts of libraries. Simple things like chemistry or physics typesetting for example. That's hard to just switch away from. can it do freetype fonts? I use XeLatex to change the fonts since the default gets boring. I've been doing all my math in latex for so long I feel like I can't just switch to something else.

darkteflon7 months ago

Love to hear some informed opinions on typst versus quarto.

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quotemstr7 months ago

C-f r u s t RETBut of course.I'd rather see effort go into improving LaTeX performance instead of creating some new incompatible thing in a trendy language. One could also imagine an Elixer-style "resyntaxing" of LaTeX that would preserve compatibility with decades of packages. I don't think a long-developed ecosystem should be given up lightly.

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Munksgaard7 months ago

I use typst to generate PDFs on the fly in my sass-platform. The only other reliable ways I could find to do that was by using LaTeX (slow) or various WebKit-based tools (also slow, and in carious states of unmaintained/deprecated). It works like a charm.

mixmastamyk7 months ago

Does this allow a book to be split into parts? One problem I had with Sphinx.

Semaphor7 months ago

If the author is reading, there’s a bug with dark mode, the `aside` (for the TOC) gets a background color of #d3d3d3 which results in very bad contrast as the font and heading are adjusted for dark mode.

beezle7 months ago

Real men use TeX or troff!

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poulpy1237 months ago

wow that's a really in-depth review, that's nice.I tried typst several months (or was it already a year?) ago, and I found it really great. I was even able to easily modify a simple plugin after barely playing 1 hr with it, where in latex that I used for years, I never even tried (to be fair the amount of plugins meant I didn't need to).I just wish I had a good reason to use it... maybe when the implement the html output ?

rsrsrs867 months ago

Typst is simply amazing. I wrote a thesis using latex and boy would I love if I had found about typst sooner.

lynndotpy7 months ago

I'd like to throw my two cents into the "my experience is limited but I like it better than LaTeX" ring. Because, in my limited experience, Typst is easier and faster than LaTeX by a lot.I'd like to emphasize how important it is that Typst is a collaborative web-app like Overleaf-- 100% of the LaTeX use I saw in academia was on Overleaf.

pseingatl7 months ago

Does Typst have epub or html export?

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iamgopal7 months ago

Is there typst based static docs generator out there ?

lutusp7 months ago

The central issue for new typesetting methods, unlike most software projects, is that to represent a solution, not a new problem, they must seamlessly communicate with other similar environments. So I have to ask:<pre><code> * Can Typist seamlessly export Latex? * Can Typist seamlessly import Latex? </code></pre> And I must link to the definitive XKCD cartoon on this topic: "Standards" <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a> .

dsrtslnd237 months ago

is this comparable to asciidoc?

zamazan4ik7 months ago

For anyone who is interested in speeding up Typst, I can recommend taking a look at this issue: <a href="https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1733">https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1733</a>TL;DR - Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) can improve Typst's performance for 10%+

bitwize7 months ago

Ah, Typst -- the Wayland of formatting systems.

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