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There's usually some confusion about this, so to clarify in advance:

- The Typst online editor is proprietary: https://typst.app

- The Typst compiler/CLI is open source: https://github.com/typst/typst

I hear that the online editor is quite good, but personally I've only ever used the CLI.

I originally picked up Typst as yet another replacement for PowerPoint (replacing my use of Marp), but have since used it for a poster and some minor text documents. And I've been very happy the results. I know that a lot of people love using LaTeX for that kind of thing, and with good reasons, but I always forgot most of the details between my (occasional) use of LaTeX, while I've found Typst to be very easy to return to

The killer features of LaTeX that does not let me go with typst (Although I like my typst generated resume) as an academic are.

1. Beamer, I create multiple slide decks per week and the out of the box setup that beamer provides with different styles and fonts for different needs are unmatched. The efforts to generate some of this on typst is not there yet.

2. Generating figures using tikz and be able to modify it on the source file. Because I don't bear using GUI tools. And now life is easier that LLM can help you with complex tikz generation.

3. Not that it is actually a point but I am used now to overleaf and I have professional account as CERN member. It is also better on collaboration level and features than typst cloud.

I hope that one day typst will grow into this direction so that I can stop using LaTeX. Until then I have couple of overleaf templates generated for my use.

> Meanwhile, in HTML and SVG export, PDFs are converted to an embedded SVG on-the-fly. And, finally, in PNG export and the web app preview, PDFs are rasterized. All of this PDF processing functionality lives right in the Typst compiler, with no system dependencies. This is only possible thanks to the amazing work of community member @LaurenzV, who created a new PDF processing library called hayro from scratch. The library is 100% written in the programming language Rust (which is also the language we use for the Typst compiler) and is thus highly portable.

Wow! That must’ve been quite an effort.

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 starting law school in a month and I need 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.

As for Typst 0.14 - I'm really happy about Accessible PDF feature and HTML export, will give each a whirl.

Really great work. Typst continues to impress. The eventual goal of HTML and PDF both as first class output will be a such a great improvement for scientific publishing.

For everyone who is using LaTeX and hasn't tried yet, give it a try. It is actually surprisingly featurefull and surpasses LaTeX in usability by a huge margin.

One of my biggest grievances with typst is that it still does not natively support locale-aware decimal separator formatting[1], and thus requires various kludges to present decimal numbers properly in non-English languages. Not that LaTeX is any better in that, though.

I think this should be solved quicker, because if it requires some sort of changes to syntax, we will have problems if the "legacy" syntax becomes entrenched, so this sort of decisions are better to be made sooner than later.

However, most my experiences with typst have been highly positive. It is much, much faster than LaTeX, and way easier. I am looking forward to see it to become more common.

1) https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1093

After over a decade of occasionally updating that one ancient .docx file, I recently rebuilt my CV/resume using typst and it's been a really fun project! My resume is now a private repo with my personal, career, and styling data stored in TOML files. Then I can pull any interesting typst resume templates, populate the information from the TOML files by looping over arrays of jobs/projects, and populate it into the doc template. It's absolutely overkill but it was a fun project and I really enjoyed working with typst. Didn't even do a tutorial, just threw myself into the language and assumed it would be intuitive enough with some examples and it absolutely is.

I think I'm going to subscribe without any intention of using the app just as a "financing" donation.

I love, and hate, LaTeX and the idea of a LaTeX successor / alternative is incredibly appealing.

And the fact that they are aware that microtypography IS important and that they are working on it is a huge huge plus.

This is great! Having PDFs as a native image format removes one of the biggest hurdles for replacing LaTeX with Typst.

I'm super happy that Typst continues to chip away at LaTeX's dominance. Kudos to the team and contributors! <3

This looks like a great release. Lossless embedding of PDFs seems like it would be useful in many scenarios. I'm surprised with how much better the character-level justified text actually looks. And I wasn't even aware that it supported exporting HTML. Typst—both the tool and the language—are more robust and enjoyable to use IME than something like Markdown, Pandoc, Org mode, and other formats, so I'll definitely consider using it for my next web project.

My only concern is backwards compatibility. How committed is the team to supporting older syntax? What will happen in a year or two from now when I have to generate a PDF from a .typ file written with version 0.13? They mention deprecations in v0.14, so I assume that I should expect breaking issues. I suppose only time will tell how difficult upgrading will be in the future.

This was a big problem for me when using LaTeX, which is why I maintained a TeX Live Docker image with the exact version and dependencies I needed. Upgrading it was always a nerve-racking ordeal. Since Typst is a single binary, this should at least be easier to manage.

> To make sure you got everything right, you can enable the new PDF/UA-1 export. PDF/UA is an international standard that helps to create universally accessible PDF files. When it is enabled, Typst will run additional checks against your document to find accessibility issues and optimize for accessibility rather than compatibility. It will find issues such as missing document titles, wrong heading hierarchies, and missing alternative descriptions.

This sounds great! Are accessible PDFs possible with LaTeX? Last time I looked, it wasn't a standard feature and there didn't seem to be any easy workaround which is a real problem when there's a requirement to produce accessible PDFs.

We used GitHub/Azure markdown plus Mermaid plus MathJax for financial model documentation. Beyond a certain complexity this really hurts.

Now we use typst, both playground (which does not call home, so no document exfiltration) or the compiler. The compiler is super easy to install, as we already have the Rust build chain installed. Compared to Tex, the 40 odd years newer design of typst makes all the difference.

I want to express my gratitude to the typsr team and congratulate them on their release.

I got started with typst because I wanted to put my resume in a got repository, for no reason other than to learn git.

One day I want to write a crosswords document using typst. I don't know how yet because I can't get my tables to be squares but one day... (:

When I did my bachelor’s, I wrote every assignment and my thesis in LaTeX—and I absolutely loved it. I loved it so much that I swore I’d never touch MS Word again. Now I’m doing my master’s, and once again, I’m writing everything, assignments and thesis, in Typst. And boy, do I love Typst. I only had to spend a fraction of the time tweaking it to get exactly what I needed. Most things just work right out of the box. The only “bad” thing, in my opinion, is that Typst isn’t quite as feature-rich as LaTeX.

There are already some Tufte-inspired templates available for Typst:

https://typst.app/universe/search/?q=tufte

Switching from LaTeX to Typst is like getting introduced to Python after a lifetime writing assembly... except it's also 10x faster

I really wish I could use Typst, but to be honest, it doesn't work with any journal I know of, let alone arXiv. It feels like a chicken-and-egg problem to me; I can't see most people who use LaTeX moving over unless journals and preprint servers adopt it, and I can't see journals or preprint servers adopting it unless people move over. Still, it's early days, I and wish the community good luck and I genuinely hope that one day I can ditch LaTeX for something markdown-like.

Living in a Berlin you encounter founder and CS people on funny occasions. So after starting using Typst I met one founder in an university dance course. Every time Typst is mentioned on HN, I've to recall that dance course.

I tried it, and it's already impressive for neither requiring a login page nor having ad-nonsense. I wish more web apps were like that.

I love typst and I tried to use it recently when shipping publications to EMNLP, AAAI, and NeurIPS. While there were a lot of upsides to it, things got very bad when the teams grew beyond just a few people. Typst is incredible for single-person or a trio of people, but the web experience is not there yet for collaboration. I’m really hoping for typst to continue and I plan to use it whenever I can for smaller projects or stuff that wont involve working with professors or students who are not interested in learning new things during publication time.

Typst is fantastic, I like it a lot (and have used LaTeX for over 30 years). I hope they keep up the great work!

Anyone using this for Literate Programming?

A quick search found:

https://github.com/litProgTypst/ (which I'm mystified by)

and

https://github.com/denkspuren/typst_programming (which hasn't been updated in two years)

Not seeing anything specific at: https://typst.app/docs/reference/scripting

I need to re-write my current project https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview again --- maybe this would be a good fit? The unique feature I am taking advantage of is writing out code blocks in separate files, then concatenating them using .lua so there's no differentiation betwixt tangle/weave, both happen, and since it's Python, no need for a compile step either.

> alt: "Diagram with two rectangles. The first is labelled 'Tagged PDF'. An arrow points to the second, labelled 'Accessibility'"

Not trying to make any statement but I'd love to see how this level of alt text detail scales to a diagram that's more than a rectangle pointing to a rectangle

I've been really pleased with Typst so far - fast rendering, less verbose than (La)TeX in many ways (backslashes hurt now!) and unicode/emoji support really seals the deal. (Disclaimer: only using for semi-formal slides and notes, not for papers and important presentations)

Wondering how this compares to Emacs org mode, which support exports to PDF slides with beamer or plain PDF document, also support to export to lots of other format. It also allows running the embedded code and export the results. Of course embedding PDF is easy.

Typst is such a pleasure to work with! Especially compiled to wasm in the browser, super fast

I've started using typst in a recent side project. An online article to PDF converter for e-Readers (reMarkable in my case): https://klartext.press/. It works like a charm. Blazing fast, beautifully typeset documents.

This name really should have been work shopped before being chosen. This and 'slint' should get together and figure out better project names.

It's indexing with imakeidx that's keeping me on LaTeX. Does anyone know offhand the state of indexing with Typst?

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Indexing

Typst is great. I'm ditching Asciidoc for writing specifications. No more terrible Ruby, wahoo!

Have a look at

https://typst.app/universe/package/soviet-matrix

This is a classic Tetris game implemented using Typst!

I used to use markdown with embedded LaTeX and pandoc for scripting. I hated the stack, it was really hard to write custom functions.

Since switching to typst my happiness with my writing tools improved dramatically.

I have been using pandoc to convert markdown files to pdfs, and keep them in a git repo. Looking at typst, I think it can be a better replacement.

I recently jumped into typst for creating a course syllabus to learn programming. The experience has been great, especially compared with the LaTeX memories from grad school.

Kinda wonder how accessible the online editor is? I should try it, see if VS Code is a linter or something for it, although there is the compiler.

Is this like DocBook/ASCIIDoc?

The accessibility support (PDF/UA-1) is VERY nice, but there's still still a lot of work to do (-> tables).

Related:

Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393842 - Sept 2025 (384 comments)

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44350322 - June 2025 (328 comments)

Typst 0.13 is out now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105444 - Feb 2025 (60 comments)

TeX and Typst: Layout Models (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43032697 - Feb 2025 (38 comments)

Using Pandoc and Typst to Produce PDFs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42271078 - Nov 2024 (19 comments)

Typst 0.12 is just... better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41888107 - Oct 2024 (4 comments)

Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821361 - Oct 2024 (235 comments)

Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941 - July 2024 (187 comments)

Typst – Compose Papers Faster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38354422 - Nov 2023 (134 comments)

I rewrote my CV in Typst and I'll never look back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38047224 - Oct 2023 (25 comments)

Typst: Finally a Solid LaTeX Alternative - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835703 - May 2023 (3 comments)

Typst, a new markup-based typesetting system, is now open source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35250210 - March 2023 (146 comments)

Typst: A Programmable Markup Language for Typesetting [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423590 - Jan 2023 (53 comments)

Typst: Compose Papers Faster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32209794 - July 2022 (30 comments)

Support in sublime text?

Yeah but can it run doom