Typst makes big strides | Hacker News Reader

Typst makes big strides

lwn.net

132 pointsleephillips33 comments

I write this in pretty much every Typst thread. Here are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX and some recent additions:

1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.

2. Compiling is instant.

3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).

4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.

5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them. [I've been informed this is actually incorrect and Latex does allow you to specify macros anywhere]

6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.

8. Compiling with Typst is always one pass.

9. I'm not sure how this would compare with Latex but I'm in law school and needed to cite using AGLC4 which has a CSL (citationstyles.org) template supported by Typst; I have confirmed the CSL XML is correct but doesn't render properly in Typst. The workaround I found was to hand typeset my own citation and bibliography which sucks.

10. Most of what you need is built in to Typst and I've yet to need to import a package or template; even for the most basic documents with Latex you find you'll need to use many packages (such as fancyhdr for customised headers and footers).

11. Latex distributions can be a monstrosity, gigabytes in size like TexLive, and I acknowledge you can get slimmed down on-demand version such as Miktex. There's just one distribution of Typst and its pretty lean, although it might be nice to have multiple implementations in the future.

12. Latex markup looks like an eye-sore, typst reads more naturally as plain-text with a bit of a markdown flavour.

13. Although I loathe discord, I find getting real time support so easy with an almost real time answer to any question I have and the community is heaps friendly; getting support with Latex is not so easy.

I wrote my first paper (nothing to publich, just for university) ever and went from typst to latest last minute because I got scared and went with the template of a studi-colleague. I heard latex was bad, but it's much worse than I could have ever anticipated.

I took the time off uni to migrate back to typst because I refuse to submit to the psychological warfare that is latex ever again.

Typst has a bunch of nice features, it seems like I discover another every time I use it for something. Most recently I saw that you can import TOML (or JSON if you really want) data into the template, making it really simple to populate the content from another tool.

Yeah, quite useful for generating pdfs for invoices from json

And unlike browser-based solutions, Typst can produce PDF/A, it can embed files into the PDF and it can produce charts and QR Codes on it's own without having to rely on an external solution.

Exactly, it will come in quite handy with the e-Invoice / ZUGFeRD regulations

I use typst for all sorts of things in customer apps: conference badges, customer invoices, social media asset generation (like thumbnails for podcasts, customer reviews, etc.), certificates of completion, progress reports, and much more. It's just so robust, efficient and works everywhere. Never again do I need to worry about html formatting to make PDFs.

As someone who makes a professional use of typst, i'm curious how you support the project financially? It seems like they have a Github Sponsors setup, but their only commercial offering is for the web editor which IMO brings little value.

I was looking for a way to donate them a little cash the other day because i found typst super useful for my non-profit activities (and super easy to teach), but i didn't find one.

They say that the subscription to their web application is a good way to fund them. Unfortunately they don't do bounties because I would like to focus money into HTML export support.

Yeah, i was not looking for a subscription but rather a one-off donation (either cash via post or bank wire).

I'm curious about what's missing for you in the current HTML export? I haven't tried it but i've read about people playing with it and it seems already quite comprehensive from an outsider's look?

I love typst. It's about time we have an authoring system like it that also let's you publish HTML versions of things you write with it instead of just PDFs. Papers in Academia for the longest time have been PDFs, which screen readers are terrible with, mainly because the PDF format is an abomination, and makes accessibility (let alone interoperability) unnecessarily painful.

PDF serves an important purpose; it’s not an abomination. It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended. HTML can not do this. It can serve as a reliable archive and be made (imperfectly) accessible, as described in the article. Of course all this comes with significant tradeoffs, including reduced interoperability, as you say. But there are good reasons for academic publishing, especially in math, CS, and physics (but also in some areas of the humanities) to prefer PDFs—it’s not just obstinacy.

I mean, I know why the format is used and what it does. That doesn't make any less of an abomination. Parsing it is an absolute clusterfuck, and accessibility for it is horrifically bad even in Acrobat. By contrast, something like HTML is far better, even if it doesn't necessarily display the document exactly the same way all the time on all devices.

> It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended.

How many authors intended to break copy and paste of their data?

I don’t have the data to answer your question. But I’d like to point out that it has little to do with my assertions. Note in particular the word “conveys”.

The word doesn't help without specifying the set of intents you meant.

But in general that would also be a mistaken post-hoc rationalization of the state of an ecosystem.

The "author's intent" could just be "I just want to fit the requirement". And the publisher's intent could just be "I don't want to change". None of which is about the deficiency of alternative formats re. "conveying [supposedly design] intent"

And PDF is an abomination because of the awful way it implements the "intent preservation"

I was able to use Typst for my thesis, it felt sooo smooth. Turned it into a conference paper half a year later, and had to use the IEEE Latex format to hand it in. Oof, that was humbling.

As someone who hasn't used Typst, how manual was the conversion process?

Not the person you’re asking, but I’ll just mention that pandoc has a Typst reader. I use a pandoc filter to write in markdown with math in Typst and convert to LaTeX:

https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/

To paraphrase Churchill, LaTeX is the worst form of typesetting experience except for all those other technologies that we've tried.

Glad that that's no longer the case!

The MathML example here is... Definitely not TeX-quality. At least not in my phone. It looks really janky.

Interesting. What browser? Because in FF or Chrome on Linux desktop, it looks basically identical to LaTeX output. But unlike when creating PDFs, you’re at the mercy of your browser’s MathML implementation (another reason PDF is great).

Chrome on Android. Here's a screenshot:

https://imgur.com/a/0VauWLv

Not so good. But the problem is not Typst, it’s Chrome on Android, or the way you have that configured.

EDIT: I just checked the article on my phone, and every browser renders the equation as in your screenshot. FF and Chromium on desktop are perfect. Another example of how mobile browsers suck.

I was maybe too hasty here. Another comment made me realize that the difference is due to the presence of the Latin Modern font on my desktop and its absence from my phone. Sorry, mobile browsers. You still suck, but less energetically than I had concluded.

So authors using MathML should supply the LM font for download or advise their readers.

That depends on the font. If you supply the Latin Modern font with your website, MathML equations will look exactly like in LaTeX.

Ah, I (the article author) am at fault here, for not pointing this out. Things looked fine in my testing because I have the LM font installed on my system.

As someone who used LaTeX heavily in grad school, using Typst in VSCode to create bespoke invites to an event was quite nice! Would highly recommend giving it a spin.

I find typst a joy to use, either in the online editor or locally. It’s the best combination I’ve yet come across of “write what you mean” - simple markdown-like syntax - with document layout and styling. Happily pay for a subscription even though most of the time I don’t use the online editor. Software worth paying for.

I use Typst for formatting my resume, and it’s been great. Models are pretty good at writing it too if you don’t want to learn the syntax.

But you still cannot compile to LaTex properly. The PDF looks great, and is easier to write than with LaTex, but for eg. arXiv filings you need Latex sources.

I just compared typst with peachpdf (c#) and others to generate big reports, invoices, etc. coming from itext 4 the open source version which was lgpl. And was blown away. Itext was quite efficient because layouting did not do a full css thingy. Which peachpdf does, which of course produces a better looking pdf. But full css eval, could byte your ass with flow elements and div wrappers. You can be extremely non performant and ram hogging pretty fast, especially since peachpdf is not optimized.

However typst? God , it is so fast that downloading and rendering it inside a pdf viewer is the new bottleneck… it generates 2000 page pdfs in second with maximum of 2 gb , however most of the time it used 250mb memory. Peachpdf used 15-30gb for that, heck even itext used 4 gb. Cpu everything was so fucking fast, even while going through p/invoke.

I just fucking love it. I mean sometimes the syntax is weird, but it’s the best layout+data to pdf renderer.

started using typst in the past year.

creating my resume in it felt as magical as it can be.

i loved the tech and ideas behind typst even added native support for it in my WYSIWYG markdown(and typst) editor[1].

[1] https://wander.md

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