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Comment by gumbojuice | Hacker News Reader

Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that, journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges to LaTeX/Word would fall in place.

For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source).

Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles to LaTeX.

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Typst is missing vital features to produce professional looking documents. Latex and Adobe InDesign use paragraph based algorithms for line breaks and hyphenation (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380111102 for Latex). That is the main reason why papers written in Word look so amateurish. Proper support for footnotes seems to be also lacking in Typst.

Footnotes might be handled properly in a future version of Typst. Regarding paragraph formatting I'm not so optimistic. I've read the thesis and papers by one of the Typst authors. They either don't seem to be aware of better approaches or they simply don't care about aesthetics.

Edit: Another thing that irks me about Typst is that it does not seem to be a purely not-for-profit project. It is tightly entangled with their commercial offering, whatever that might mean for the future of the "free" version.

I'm not sure what you're referring to because when justification is enabled Typst uses almost the same line breaking algorithm as TeX. [1]

One problem we had was over-eager hyphenation. We've addressed that recently. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/9b001e21121ab7b5645aa36f...

[2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4584

That is great news! It wasn't there the last time I checked. Maybe I missed it. Thanks for clarifying!

The only thing I need to start writing more serious documents with Typst is an equivalent to latexdiff. But I really think (and hope) that this will replace latex in the future. Alone the compilation time makes it so much nice to use! Meanwhile I am supporting them by having a pro account, which is not even so expensive.

Arxiv will accept a rendered pdf, no source files required. Are any special features unlocked if source files are uploaded?

They autoconvert latex to html. Typst can't currently produce html output.

Just for completeness the html export issue is here: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721

Quarto can convert to typst, html, and LaTeX through pandoc.

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