https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/8147
Discursive footnotes do not really work when including bibliography references. I've also hit other issues, like footnotes appearing a page before the text they are linked from.
It's a real shame, as otherwise it's great software. I suspect footnotes are currently buggy because most users are currently from the science world and use inline referencing instead.
I'm really hoping this is fixed soon. (And once I hit my current deadline this week, I'll take a look at it myself.)
But at the moment, a big caveat for anyone working in the humanities / who uses e.g. Chicago-style footnotes.
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 (mostly via LLMs). From there, I generate both a nice digital PDF and a print-ready PDF using Typst, and then use Pandoc again to convert the Typst into what ultimately becomes an EPUB.
It all works quite beautifully. Most of the challenges I've run into are related to Typst features that don't map cleanly to Pandoc, so I end up adding a few funky conditionals so those features aren't hit when converting via Pandoc. sys.inputs makes that very easy https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/11588
The books in question: https://thelabofthought.co/shop
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.
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 thing. The problems mostly show up with more niche features.
What helped me was pointing the LLM to the current Typst docs, either the website or as they mention in their blog about the new update they also have a PDF export of the docs now (https://github.com/typst/typst/releases/download/v0.15.0/typ...). The docs are very good, and I suspect older training data plus Typst’s breaking changes are part of the problem.
One downside is that because I started using Typst with LLMs right away, I got a big head start but never became fully fluent in the language. I still find myself going back to the docs, the internet or an LLM more often than I’d like.
Much easier stack (I stopped installing Latex-stacks myself, and switched to Overleaf, because it was just too finicky). Much simpler language. Just works.
"A single document can now contain multiple bibliographies"
Mathematical equations are now automatically exported to MathML (thanks to @mkorje)[1]
Pandoc probably uses latex under the hood, and Typst is order of magnitudes faster. Also, much better error messages.
Typst is vastly superior for usage in automation or when developing document classes.
If that's not your use case, don't bother.
I use typst in visual studio code using tiny mist extension. I can generate PDF without installing any new software other than vscode which I already have and the tiny mist extension. The live preview is also nice.
The one thing that bothers me is the dollar sign and the hash sign so to write something like saved $50 million using c#, I write something like saved USD 50 million using #csharp
And near the top I add a variable like this
#let csharp = "C#"- formatting math blocks is mostly not a thing; some formatters will straight up break the document depending on the flavor you use
- lsp
- live preview; you could use e.g. a neovim plugin for that, but it's built on top of mathjax
- pandoc isn't even a single flavor, as you have a bunch of feature flags and multiple ways to do the same thing
- rendering with pandoc is pretty slow even for a few pages of lecture notes (especially compared to typst)
- latex (required by pandoc) is huge, meanwhile typst binary was something like 50M last time I checked
- syntax highlighting: markdown treesitter grammar only supports the common extensions, e.g. the esoteric latex block variants break the entire document
I guess if I didn't need math rendering, the only major complaint I'd have is performance, but at that point .txt is enough
Latex is a typical route to produce pdfs according to your specification, but typst is what I use; occasionally groff. I use latex when what I am typesetting uses greek, arabic or hebrew text, but only because I haven't yet bothered to learn the typst approach to them.
No.
`--pdf-engine=typst`
applicative’s comment is correct. Every one of your bullet points is wrong, except perhaps the one about treesitter highlighting, but what should one expect? Why should a Markdown parser know anything about arbitrary Markdown extensions?
pandoc -r markdown -w pdf --pdf-engine=typst input.md -o output.pdf
However, I really dislike the 'magic' in the math mode syntax, and I think dropping backslashes (more generally, a delineator) for commands was a mistake. Those aren't blockers though, and I think the org is largely making good decisions. I'm really looking forward to the day I can write research in it!
I think all that's remaining is time in the community and stability. Once journals begin accepting it, I know I'll definitely try to submit in it.
I’m doing some postgraduate where I need to submit a paper written in the two column IEEE style. I’m pretty sure I spent 40% of my time last time fighting with a Word template, rather than producing content.
Have conferences that traditionally accepted latex source (and specified latex templates) started accepting typst as well?
Yes, https://typst.app/ is the official Typst app (part of how they make money).
> Have conferences that traditionally accepted latex source (and specified latex templates) started accepting typst as well?
Very few by now.
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.
I use typst to format sheet music. Given a folder of PDFs, I currently have a script that generates a booklet of music for each person in the ensemble. Hopefully now I can just run a single typst file which outputs multiple PDFs.
Also using it to generate printable programs for concerts: https://concert-programs.projects.jaygoel.com/
I’m seriously considering rewriting it in Typst at some point. It probably would not be that hard, and I’d likely get much faster builds with far fewer dependencies.
I see many folks saying you're producing beautiful PDFs. How are you dealing with design?
So imo in terms of scientific writing it's pretty off the mark
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).
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.
I have been waiting on this one for years now. Great work.
The ecosystem is not quite a mature as latex, however I can implement the things I need myself.
If you are on the fence, do yourself a favor and try it. There is a VS Code extension https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=myriad-d....
- Adobe Illustrator - Adobe InDesign - Markdown with and without custom themes - Markdown compiled to .idml to integrate into InDesign - HTML and CSS - LATeX
Typst is so far one of the most enjoyable ways of programmatically generating layouted stuff I ever used.
The only thing missing is a good Desktop editor that allows dumb users to double-click a .typ file and see/edit the file instead of having to setup VSCode, plugins etc.