Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment and use cases

  • Many commenters describe Typst as a “breath of fresh air” and now use it for CVs, theses, lecture notes, books, invoices, internal company docs, PDFs from web backends, and even high-volume pipelines (millions of PDFs/day).
  • It is often adopted where people previously used Markdown+Pandoc+LaTeX or Word, and is recommended to students as a nicer “word processor replacement” for technical work.

Ergonomics, language, and tooling

  • Typst’s syntax is seen as closer to Markdown for text and LaTeX/MathJax for math, but with a real programming language (functions, types, modules, JSON import, loops, conditionals).
  • Users praise:
    • Instant or near‑instant compilation and live preview.
    • Single static binary with no giant TeX distribution or aux-file mess.
    • Much clearer diagnostics, more like modern compilers.
    • Easier version control and templating; writing templates feels like “normal programming” instead of macro black magic.
  • VS Code + Tinymist LSP, Neovim support, and the typst.app web editor are all reported as working well.

Comparison with LaTeX and inertia

  • Pain points with LaTeX repeatedly cited: slow compilation, cryptic errors, fragile templates, package conflicts, obscure macro language, massive distributions.
  • Fans of LaTeX counter that:
    • Output quality (especially math, graphics, microtypography) is still unmatched.
    • Stability and long‑term standardization are a major strength.
    • With good templates, LaTeX is “painless” for many journal and book workflows.
  • Several note that heavy LaTeX users might be least motivated to switch because they have already paid the learning cost.

Adoption barriers and ecosystem

  • Biggest barrier for research: journals, conferences, and arXiv overwhelmingly expect LaTeX; some people draft in Typst but convert to LaTeX for submission.
  • Typst’s package ecosystem (Cetz for drawings, physics/chemistry/visualization libraries, bibliography support) is growing but still lags the breadth of CTAN.
  • Some worry about company control and paid web features (e.g., Zotero sync, private packages) versus LaTeX’s fully community-run ecosystem.

Limitations, rough edges, and ongoing work

  • Reported gaps include: image wrapping/floats (handled via third‑party packages), tricky multi-page tables (widows/orphans), multilingual hyphenation, HTML/EPUB output still experimental, and evolving math-mode heuristics that some find too “clever”.
  • There have been breaking changes between versions and occasional package bugs; HTML and accessibility (PDF/UA, PDF/A) are under active development.
  • Despite these, multiple users have successfully produced long theses and books and found the tradeoffs worthwhile.