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- Hacker News
- Typst also has native scripting! For fun, I've been working on a small statistical distributions library in Typst, distro[^1] that uses plain Typst.
It's really nice having a decently powerful scripting component, it makes for some fun literate-style programming. You can package things up pretty easily for others to use, too[^2]. It even supports WASM plugins, if you want to go wild.
This package, conch[^3], renders a mini OS and terminal, based on Typst:
> A shell simulator that renders interactive terminal sessions in Typst, powered by a Rust WASM plugin.
> Type shell commands in your Typst document. Conch executes them against a virtual filesystem and renders a realistic terminal window — complete with colored output, syntax highlighting, and animation support.
[^1]: https://github.com/stochastical/distro
by subset - 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.
by trostaft - 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?by opto
- 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/.by Rochus
- 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"
by uniqueuid - HTML support just keeps getting better and better!
[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/7436Mathematical equations are now automatically exported to MathML (thanks to @mkorje)[1]by thomascountz - 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
by raybb - 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.
by room271