Hacker News

Typst makes big strides

85 points by leephillips ago | 13 comments

film42 |next [-]

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.

spinningslate |next |previous [-]

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.

hedgehog |next |previous [-]

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.

sudorm-rf--no-p |root |parent [-]

Yeah, quite useful for generating pdfs for invoices from json

ajkjk |next |previous [-]

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

leephillips |root |parent [-]

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).

podviaznikov |next |previous [-]

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

andonvr |next |previous [-]

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.

MaxBarraclough |root |parent [-]

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

leephillips |root |parent [-]

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/

wxw |next |previous [-]

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.

criemen |next |previous [-]

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!

dwrodri |previous [-]

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.