Typst makes big strides (lwn.net)

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.

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.

I just compared typst with peachpdf (c#) and others to generate big reports, invoices, etc. coming from itext 4 the open source version which was lgpl. And was blown away. Itext was quite efficient because layouting did not do a full css thingy. Which peachpdf does, which of course produces a better looking pdf. But full css eval, could byte your ass with flow elements and div wrappers. You can be extremely non performant and ram hogging pretty fast, especially since peachpdf is not optimized.

However typst? God , it is so fast that downloading and rendering it inside a pdf viewer is the new bottleneck… it generates 2000 page pdfs in second with maximum of 2 gb , however most of the time it used 250mb memory. Peachpdf used 15-30gb for that, heck even itext used 4 gb. Cpu everything was so fucking fast, even while going through p/invoke.

I just fucking love it. I mean sometimes the syntax is weird, but it’s the best layout+data to pdf renderer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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