Typst 0.15.0

254

sschu about 6 hours ago 70 commentsRead Article on typst.app

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Discussion Sentiment

86% Positive

Analyzed from 2653 words in the discussion.

Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

room271•about 2 hours ago

As a former software developer, now turned student (studying theology while I train to become a pastor), Typst has been great for writing my dissertation with one notable exception: it really doesn't handle footnotes well. Specifically, see:

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.

davidpapermill•about 1 hour ago

Footnotes are very hard to typeset. They’re up there with tables as the biggest headache for any typesetter.

Kokouane•about 2 hours ago

really interested to hear about your transition from developer to student. i'd love to talk to you. my email is in the about on my profile.

raybb•about 4 hours ago

I'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with.

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

weinzierl•about 4 hours ago

"LLMs struggle with Typst a bit"

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.

echoangle•about 3 hours ago

I had the same experience as the root commenter. Sometimes ChatGPT seems to generate invalid typst code that doesn’t even compile. Maybe the syntax changed and it did work at some point but some stuff looked so wrong that I would guess it just doesn’t have enough training data for proper typst generation without feeding examples into the context first.

elsoja•about 2 hours ago

Using skills can help a lot. They can guide agents to not use LaTeX syntax (a common problem) and provide access to the full documentation.

https://github.com/apcamargo/typst-skills/

wtb04•about 3 hours ago

I’ve been using Typst pretty heavily for the past few months after a few years of LaTeX, and I’ve had a similar experience. I do really love Typst though. It feels nimble, pleasant to work with and like a huge improvement over LaTeX in a lot of ways.

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.

Rochus•16 minutes ago

Typst is great. I think they'll catch up to LuaTeX in terms of typographic quality in near future. But Typst is for typesetting; it's essentially a programming language for layout. If you compare it to e.g. Asciidoc, the latter is for content and semantics. We need both. But Asciidoc has unneccessary complexity and ambiguity, and the results are often surprising. So I made an unambiguous, deterministic subset of Asciidoc which I now use for most of my specs and which can be parsed by a single recursive descent parser and generate Typst. It's still work in progress, but if anyone is interested, here is the link: https://github.com/rochus-keller/leandoc/.

meling•15 minutes ago

I’ve been using Typst lately and it has been great. I’ve made an exam template for my university and made an export feature so that I could generate the exam in the json format that our online exam system (WISEflow) expects, with support for multiple choice and essay style questions.

It is so snappy and with great error messages. I encourage people to try it out. The typst tutorial is very approachable. Thanks to the Typst devs for this great piece of software.

uniqueuid•about 5 hours ago

I have nothing but great things to say about typst, and this is my personal favorite from this release:

"A single document can now contain multiple bibliographies"

thomascountz•about 5 hours ago

HTML support just keeps getting better and better!

   Mathematical equations are now automatically exported to MathML (thanks to @mkorje)[1]

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/7436

TimorousBestie•about 3 hours ago

Oh, that’s very exciting! That probably improves the path from Typst to EPUB considerably!

opto•about 4 hours ago

As a non-developer who really only uses computers to write and produce documents, why would I use typst over org-mode or $your_fave_markdown + pandoc?

mr_mitm•about 4 hours ago

You can pass a JSON structure to a Typst document and render it however you like. No need for a templating engine or anything like that.

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.

aleks_me2•10 minutes ago

you can tell pandoc to use typst as pdf-engine.

I use this command to create pdf from my md file.

  Downloads/pandoc-3.9/bin/pandoc \
  README.md \
  -o "my-output.pdf" \
  --pdf-engine=typst \
  -V papersize=a4 \
  -V fontsize=10pt \
  -V margin-left=2.5cm \
  -V margin-right=2.5cm \
  -V margin-top=2.5cm \
  -V margin-bottom=2.5cm \
  -V title="My title" \
  -V lang=de \
  --include-in-header=typst-header.typ \
  --toc --toc-depth=3 2>&1

That's the typst-header.typ

  #set figure(placement: none)
  #show figure: set block(breakable: true)
  #set table(
    inset: 5pt,
    stroke: 0.5pt + rgb("#cccccc"),
  )
  #show table: set text(size: 8pt)
  #show table.cell: it => {
    set text(hyphenate: true)
    show raw: set text(size: 6.5pt)
    it
  }
  #set par(justify: true)
  #show heading: it => block(sticky: true, it)

applicative•about 4 hours ago

To produce a pdf, pandoc uses typst, pdfroff, lualatex, whatever you please. There is no particular connection to latex. The idea exhibits complete ignorance.

spudlyo•about 3 hours ago

There was probably a nicer way of expressing this, but yes, ideally I will continue to use Org mode for my documents and substitute typst for LaTex when exporting to pdf.

collabs•about 4 hours ago

I'm sure everyone has their own use case but I use typst for resumes or other documents that I want to keep in git but I need to share with others using PDF.

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#"

seanclayton•about 3 hours ago

Markdown has the same class of issue and resolves it the same way you would with Typst: The escape character \. You instead write saved \$50 million using C\#.

runarberg•about 1 hour ago

I never understood why markdown authors are so insistent on using a single $ to denote math. Math is outside the commonmark spec so this is entirely up to plugin authors.

I am an author of a fairly popular (and early) math plugin for markdown and I resisted (albeit not very hard). I made $$ the default delimiter but I noticed very soon that my users hated it, and finally I gave up and made $ the default delimiter.

What I would have preferred is for $ to behave exactly like backticks (except a minimum of two to start inline math) So you could do stuff like $$ f $ x $$ to render f $ x meaning function f applied with x. And write stuff like:

    $$$optional-tag
    f $ x
    $$$

for block math. I even wrote a competing plugin to my older one where I do this, but I don‘t think anybody uses is, because most people writing math in markdown are expecting it to behave exactly like latex.

kryptiskt•about 4 hours ago

Typst does typesetting like TeX (or InDesign for a WYSIWYG alternative), neither org-mode nor markdown has a rich enough formatting language for general typesetting, like if you want to make a flyer for a concert, a brochure or a comic book.

anuramat•about 3 hours ago

I tried using markdown+pandoc for my notes for a while, but I couldn't figure out even the most basic things, mostly because of the dozens of incompatible flavors; in no particular order:

- 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

applicative•about 3 hours ago

Latex is in no sense required by pandoc and never has been, not ten years ago, not twenty years ago. Everything you are writing is deep conceptual confusion from top to bottom. You might as well say it has required Microsoft Word since the docx readers and writers came out.

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.

anuramat•about 2 hours ago

only if you don't care about the output and half the features; otherwise you can just use "mv" to compile your documents to .txt

leephillips•about 3 hours ago

“latex (required by pandoc)”

No.

`--pdf-engine=typst`

anuramat•about 2 hours ago

but then you're limited to an undocumented subset of pandoc markdown

applicative•about 4 hours ago

I pass from markdown to typst pdf via pandoc a few times a day. From that point of view it is just an alternative to latex or roff, e.g.

pandoc -r markdown -w pdf --pdf-engine=typst input.md -o output.pdf

JoshTriplett•about 4 hours ago

Markdown is for "I want to type semantic content and get a vaguely reasonable result". Typst is for typesetting documents where you care what the output looks like, and where you want a print-quality PDF (or, in the future, also HTML; currently still WIP).

jwr•about 4 hours ago

I use pandoc + typst to render beautiful documents from Markdown. Works really, really well.

jfb•about 4 hours ago

It produces beautiful PDF output from org-mode!

almostjazz•about 4 hours ago

Compilation speed on typst is crazy

trostaft•about 3 hours ago

I've been using LaTeX for math for over a decade now. I'm pretty happy with it frankly, but there are major pain points in the compilation time and whenever it's time to interface with the language programmatically. Typst is, frankly, awesome in that regard.

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.

afdbcreid•about 3 hours ago

I've heard this from other LaTeX veterans, but as someone that has never done any LaTeX himself and was scared by all those backslashes and braces, the simple C-like syntax is a blessing.

bigfatkitten•about 3 hours ago

I became a Typst user earlier this week, and it has been a delightful experience. It did not take me long at all to get up to speed. I have used LaTeX before, but that was over 20 years ago.

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.

flossly•about 1 hour ago

An LLM turned all my Latex projects to Typst and I'm not looking back.

Much easier stack (I stopped installing Latex-stacks myself, and switched to Overleaf, because it was just too finicky). Much simpler language. Just works.

JuniperMesos•about 1 hour ago

I'm excited to see the HTML generation support in typst continuing to get better - the fact that they're generating their own online documentation with typst now is very encouraging.

jeremyscanvic•about 3 hours ago

I've switched form LaTeX to Typst for all my informal/semi-formal writing and it's a delight to work with. I hope I'll be able to use it for more formal documents in the future (conference/journal papers, slides for high stakes presentations)

vatsachak•about 4 hours ago

Typst killed the invoice industry

boromi•about 3 hours ago

How so?

CodesInChaos•5 minutes ago

Typst and its json based templating makes it easy to create good looking invoice PDFs for free.

The open-source solutions we tried before were annoying (Used LaTeX, wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint in production and evaluated several more). To avoid that pain we asked some commercial PDF generator software for a quote, but the pricing was insane.

d4rkp4ttern•about 2 hours ago

Is there anything similar to (or better than) overleaf for collaborating on typst docs? To be clear, overleaf isn’t all that great but I sometimes work with groups that are used to it.

Have conferences that traditionally accepted latex source (and specified latex templates) started accepting typst as well?

afdbcreid•about 1 hour ago

> Is there anything similar to (or better than) overleaf for collaborating on typst docs? To be clear, overleaf isn’t all that great but I sometimes work with groups that are used to it.

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.

miki123211•about 2 hours ago

How's Typst with tagged PDF (particularly math in tagged PDF)?

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.

memset•about 3 hours ago

This is awesome! I’ve been excited about the new bundle feature for months.

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/

paradox460•38 minutes ago

Curious as to why typst over something like Lilypond, which is built around music

wtb04•about 3 hours ago

Cool project. I made something similar to programmatically generate my CV, but using LaTeX with a LuaLaTeX backend. It works, but it is really slow and has a lot of dependencies.

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.

memset•about 1 hour ago

Everything for typst was generated via LLM. The template itself takes json as input and then uses the typst template language to render. It works very very well.

lizimo•about 5 hours ago

Typst has probably saved us thousands of dollars generating PDF documents programmatically.

domoritz•about 4 hours ago

You might already do this, but great opportunity to support them with a donation.

Zariff•37 minutes ago

Is this because it has replaced paid SaaS for you?

rayshan•about 3 hours ago

Typest is amazing, Claude Code + Opus 4.8 knows how to use it, but I found that Claude by default is crap at designing even a reasonably formatted PDF. E.g. Claude sets the line height to be so small, all the lines are squished together, and a 1-pager PDF is half blank.

I see many folks saying you're producing beautiful PDFs. How are you dealing with design?

mr_mitm•about 3 hours ago

Have you tried showing Claude your output, or simply telling it to look at the PNG output? Together with some design or frontend skill you should get reasonable results.

flossly•about 1 hour ago

My Claude is looking into the PDFs, and makes changes, then looks again, etc. I did not even tell it to. It just knows how to use it all...

satvikpendem•about 3 hours ago

Apparently Typst isn't supported by many journals, forcing LaTeX usage, anyone have experiences with this situation?

mamami•about 3 hours ago

I still much prefer LaTeX actually, I don't feel like Typst improves over its main flaw, i.e. lack of consistency. One could argue that it's even more inconsistent. I really miss commands, \section for example clearly does what it says it does, while '=' is more nebulous. I don't like that instead of typing `\alpha+c` now I need to write `alpha + c` it blurs the line between what is a command and what isn't.

So imo in terms of scientific writing it's pretty off the mark

mr_mitm•about 2 hours ago

Most, if not all of these are just syntactic sugar. You can simply write `#heading()` instead. Although I'm not sure if there is an equivalent in math mode.

ashton314•about 1 hour ago

I spoke to the couple (it’s like a single married couple + a bunch of scripts they’ve wrote) who handle the formatting for a bunch of the programming language-related conferences around the world (and others too maybe) and they are interested in Typst and are looking into it! (They’re also super nice folks.)

wps•about 5 hours ago

> A single document can now contain multiple bibliographies

I have been waiting on this one for years now. Great work.

ravenical•about 4 hours ago

lejalv•about 4 hours ago

Reminder that it's 2026 and batch-mode typesetting seems an oddly low bar for what we can get from a computer.

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).

leephillips•about 3 hours ago

“batch-mode typesetting seems an oddly low bar for what we can get from a computer.”

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.

adamnemecek•about 3 hours ago

Almost exactly a year ago, I made the switch from generating LaTeX from markdown using pandoc to typst. Best decision I have ever made. I can actually write my own macros (both LaTeX and pandoc were a pain in the ass).

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....

foo42•about 3 hours ago

good timing, I just started learning Typst this weekend!

atoav•about 4 hours ago

I have used many things to generate print documents and layouted PDFs:

- 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.