A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025)

aankitg12 2 days ago 14 commentsRead Article on imaginarytext.ca

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seanhunter•17 minutes ago

I have to say having been a diehard latex person I tried out typst a few weeks ago and within a day I was producing beautiful documents with equations that were as nice as Latex and wildly less of a pita to type. I'm going to be using it for all my study notes from now on.

And a couple of docs I converted from latex went from about 10s to compile in latex to 10ms to compile in typst. I didn't think this would be a big deal since my docs aren't that big and I didn't feel like I was waiting long for compile but I'm already much more productive as a result.

Having said all of that, I have no idea why you would want pandoc or markdown involved. Typst (unlike latex) is really no harder than markdown to type, so you should just be using typst rather than markdown if that's what you want. Then you don't need pandoc in the mix at all.

llimllib•about 10 hours ago

I wish the article showed what the markdown format for working with typst and pandoc looked like, and what an output PDF looked like. I have no idea whether I'm interested or not from this article

Terretta•about 9 hours ago

Examples pf typst styling here:

https://typst.app/docs/tutorial/advanced-styling/

And his template here:

https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2025/img/article.typ

Gethsemane•about 3 hours ago

Very nice! I also like working from pandoc where possible - being able to split the output into a latex/typst file as well as a docx is very handy, especially when working with collaborators who are more comfortable with word. I wish markdown would see more support in scientific writing - it would solve so many of the headaches with formatting etc (and reduce microsoft's dominance in research)

jwr•about 3 hours ago

Incidentally, I developed my own template for a markdown rendering pipeline: markdown -> pandoc -> typst, with mermaid diagrams.

This works very, very well. I get linked in-document references, diagrams, tables, table of contents — everything I need for my design documents (and consulting work).

bobek•about 4 hours ago

This template is a great starting point. I have tweaked [0] it for A4 and two-column output, if anybody is interested.

[0]: https://www.bobek.cz/til/pandoc-markdown-typst/

Terretta•about 9 hours ago

From the article:

Last summer … Fast-forward to spring 2025. In the intervening months, Typst has been upgraded twice (to v0.13) and Pandoc has upgraded at least 3 times (currently at v3.6.4), and my templates don’t work anymore.

This template is from March 2025, and we're now May 2026, with four more releases to Typst 0.14.2 (December 12, 2025), and with Pandoc 3.9.0.2 (2026-03-19).

LAC-Tech•about 9 hours ago

At the risk of making a fool of myself in-front of the rest of the class, I will come out and admit I don't know what the article is talking about.

> Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF.

I understand that Typst is a markup language that can output a pdf file (big Typst fan btw).

I understand Pandoc is a thing that transforms documents of one kind to documents of another, ie markdown to html.

But the author wants to "typeset markdown-formatted article to PDF". Which makes me wonder what this has to do with typst at all.

thornewolf•about 8 hours ago

The author explain this in more detail in the article; I also was initially confused. The key details come from their broken down pandoc command. Specifically, these two flags:

  --pdf-engine=typst
  -V template=article.typ

Despite the input content being a .md file, we see that the .md contents populate the .typ file. Pandoc then understands how to convert the populated .typ file into a .pdf. The author also notes in their hyperlinked .typ document where the body content is placed:

  // THIS IS THE ACTUAL BODY:

What is not clear to me is the actual mechanism that tells pandoc where to place the body contents in the template. I presume it's some "magic" from the pandoc docs. The pandoc templates documentation[1] does reveal to us that `-V` is setting a variable called `template`. I don't have pandoc locally, but from another post[2] from the same author and a chatgpt query, it seems that the `body` symbol in the template is the chosen substitution symbol.

[1]: https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/6-templates.html

[2]: https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2024/pandoc-typst-tutorial/

alethic•about 7 hours ago

Pandoc templates use $...$ or ${...} for variable substitution, yes. body is one of the special default variables: the rest are documented in the manual. If you scroll to the bottom of the template linked from the article, you'll notice a $body$, along with a number of $if(...)$ $endif$ conditionals.

(This actually interferes with Typst's math mode. But you can manually construct math blocks, so no real problem. Pandoc variables are only valid within templates anyway.)

https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#variables-set-automatically

__mharrison__•about 6 hours ago

I'll give an example.

I write Python, software engineering, and data science books in Jupyter. (Because I want both text and code). I've written my own toolchain (multiple times, don't ask, yes, I've tried the one you're thinking of and it didn't work for me).

I need to convert the notebooks into chapters in my books (PDF so I can print them). In the past, I used code to convert to LaTeX. (It was horrible).

Now, I use code to convert the Jupyter file to markdown, then (I use pandoc too) to typst. (It is 100x better than LaTeX).

(I also use pandoc to convert markdown to epub).

adolph•about 9 hours ago

Thank you kind person for posting this. I've just started my Pandoc journey formatting books for reading in a secondhand Sony DPT-RP1.