{"slug": "typst", "name": "Typst", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "Markup-based typesetting system and compiler for creating PDFs, positioned as a modern LaTeX alternative.", "recommenders": 44, "commenters": 51, "warners": 2, "score": 38.558, "rising": 2.2, "first": "2025-11-15", "latest": "2026-10-26", "why": "HN commenters like Typst as a simpler, faster replacement for LaTeX, using it for theses, books, slides and data-driven PDFs such as invoices and resumes.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 48, "neutral": 6, "compare": 2, "warn": 1}, "spark": [4, 1, 5, 0, 0, 3, 4, 16, 2, 2, 7, 4], "listed": true, "loved": ["Easier than LaTeX", "Templated PDF generation"], "caveat": "Ecosystem gaps", "short_quote": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough.", "icon": true, "domain": "typst.app", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://typst.app", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Typst"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like Typst as a simpler, faster replacement for LaTeX", "cites": [{"id": 803934240, "item_id": 50245890, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245890", "by": "lopsotronic", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I seriously recommend a look at Typst. It's like LaTeX for humans.", "excerpt": "Go talk to the browser vendors and have them roll in the CSS L3 PMM[1] specs, which have been in draft for . . . let's see here . . . oh, huh, two decades. I guarantee the instant - the millisecond - that CSS PMM goes into the browser, that is the second the PDF ecosystem goes poof[2]. Aside from all that, back to the core point, it's quite late in the day to restrict HTML to page-based UX. It's been at least a decad", "context": "", "use_case": "document markup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Websites Should Be Printable"}, {"id": 776764336, "item_id": 48547771, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547771", "by": "flossly", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "An LLM turned all my Latex projects to Typst and I'm not looking back.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 768791280, "item_id": 48049455, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "by": "Hendrikto", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable.", "excerpt": "I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \\makeatletter \\makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 776216784, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 744387904, "item_id": 46524244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524244", "by": "eterm", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed", "excerpt": "I've been finding the reams of markdown that claude generates too difficult to read comfortably, so I switched to asking it to generate PDFs with typst instead. Without even writing a \"skill\", it nails the execution, and then generated this booklet of examples with only a minimal prompt. ( It made up all the examples itself. ) Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed, the almost instant compilation ", "context": "", "use_case": "generating PDF documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude and Typst \u2013 Examples for AI-Assisted Document Generation [pdf]"}]}, {"text": ", using it for theses, books, slides and data-driven PDFs such as invoices and resumes.", "cites": [{"id": 768795840, "item_id": 48049740, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049740", "by": "huijzer", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough.", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it\u2019s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis", "context": "PhD author", "use_case": "writing thesis and book", "switched_from": "", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 776733584, "item_id": 48545849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545849", "by": "raybb", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it has been nothing but amazing", "excerpt": "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 (mo", "context": "publishes books of student essays", "use_case": "producing books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 801461472, "item_id": 50091342, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091342", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-10-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just use Typst for presentations now", "excerpt": "Genuine question: what does Keynote do that PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress doesn't? I'm a bit out of the loop and just use Typst for presentations now, but I'm not suggesting it as an alternative to Keynote for anyone who doesn't mind a compilation step. If PowerPoint is sufficient, it (mostly) works on Linux now: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake", "context": "", "use_case": "presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI"}, {"id": 799382592, "item_id": 49961412, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961412", "by": "atoav", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love typst.", "excerpt": "I love typst. It is a simple way to create reusable layouts and functions that you can fill with dynamic data. E.g. I am a freelancer and made an invoice template where I just have to provide my customers data and the amounts. It automatically renders a QR code that my customer can scan that enters the right IBAN, subject, amount into their banking account (there is a standard for everything). Additionally it calcula", "context": "freelancer", "use_case": "invoices and lab reports", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst 0.15 Contains Multitudes"}, {"id": 797596112, "item_id": 49849757, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849757", "by": "film42", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's just so robust, efficient and works everywhere.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "builds customer apps", "use_case": "generating PDFs in customer apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797586272, "item_id": 49849142, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849142", "by": "wxw", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Typst for formatting my resume, and it\u2019s been great.", "excerpt": "I use Typst for formatting my resume, and it\u2019s been great. Models are pretty good at writing it too if you don\u2019t want to learn the syntax.", "context": "", "use_case": "formatting resume", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}]}, {"text": " The most common caveat is that it still trails LaTeX in typographic quality and specialized packages", "cites": [{"id": 735075520, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst renders around ~1000x faster and has better tooling", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}, {"id": 756359521, "item_id": 47272470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272470", "by": "kkfx", "date": "2026-03-06", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Typist can't match", "excerpt": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent. The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, fol", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}, {"id": 776771616, "item_id": 48548226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548226", "by": "Rochus", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is great. I think they'll catch up to LuaTeX in terms of typographic quality in near future.", "excerpt": "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 Asci", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776216784, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}]}, {"text": ", and one user reports buggy footnotes in a dissertation.", "cites": [{"id": 776749984, "item_id": 48546874, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546874", "by": "room271", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst has been great for writing my dissertation with one notable exception", "excerpt": "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 pa", "context": "former software developer, theology student", "use_case": "writing dissertation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Easier than LaTeX", "summary": "Former LaTeX users find it more understandable, consistent and simpler to set up.", "quotes": [{"id": 768791280, "item_id": 48049455, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "by": "Hendrikto", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable.", "excerpt": "I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \\makeatletter \\makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 776764336, "item_id": 48547771, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547771", "by": "flossly", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "An LLM turned all my Latex projects to Typst and I'm not looking back.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776216784, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}]}, {"label": "Templated PDF generation", "summary": "Used to generate invoices, badges, certificates and reports from templates and imported data.", "quotes": [{"id": 799382592, "item_id": 49961412, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961412", "by": "atoav", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love typst.", "excerpt": "I love typst. It is a simple way to create reusable layouts and functions that you can fill with dynamic data. E.g. I am a freelancer and made an invoice template where I just have to provide my customers data and the amounts. It automatically renders a QR code that my customer can scan that enters the right IBAN, subject, amount into their banking account (there is a standard for everything). Additionally it calcula", "context": "freelancer", "use_case": "invoices and lab reports", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst 0.15 Contains Multitudes"}, {"id": 797596112, "item_id": 49849757, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849757", "by": "film42", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's just so robust, efficient and works everywhere.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "builds customer apps", "use_case": "generating PDFs in customer apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797585952, "item_id": 49849122, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849122", "by": "hedgehog", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst has a bunch of nice features, it seems like I discover another every time I use it", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "document templates", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}]}, {"label": "Long documents", "summary": "Commenters have written PhD theses, dissertations and several books with it.", "quotes": [{"id": 768795840, "item_id": 48049740, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049740", "by": "huijzer", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough.", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it\u2019s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis", "context": "PhD author", "use_case": "writing thesis and book", "switched_from": "", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 776733584, "item_id": 48545849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545849", "by": "raybb", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it has been nothing but amazing", "excerpt": "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 (mo", "context": "publishes books of student essays", "use_case": "producing books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 766734048, "item_id": 47920878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920878", "by": "noelwelsh", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I switched from pandoc / md / LaTex to Typst for my book[2], and have been very happy with it.", "excerpt": "On a quick read of the docs I'm a bit worried Quarkdown doesn't have the right evaluation model for the job. Text layout typically iterates to a fixed point, because adjusting the layout of one part of the document can throw out layout at another part, require another layout pass and so on. Typst has the concept of context[1] for this. I didn't see anything in Quarkdown that seemed similar, though perhaps I missed it", "context": "author writing a book", "use_case": "writing a book", "switched_from": "Pandoc", "story": "Quarkdown \u2013 Markdown with Superpowers"}]}, {"label": "LLM-friendly", "summary": "Several users say LLMs write and edit Typst well.", "quotes": [{"id": 764929296, "item_id": 47808081, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47808081", "by": "weinzierl", "date": "2026-04-17", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is really powerful", "excerpt": "\"create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more.\" I use Opus to generate Typst for that and I'm already pretty happy with that approach. It gives me a degree of control I do not have with other methods, because 1. Typst is really powerful 2. Opus is really good at surgically modifying Typst I basically never look at the Typst code for this. Telling Opus visually what I want changed", "context": "", "use_case": "polished documents and slides", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude Design"}, {"id": 776734512, "item_id": 48545907, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545907", "by": "weinzierl", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.", "excerpt": "\"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.", "context": "", "use_case": "documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 744387904, "item_id": 46524244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524244", "by": "eterm", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed", "excerpt": "I've been finding the reams of markdown that claude generates too difficult to read comfortably, so I switched to asking it to generate PDFs with typst instead. Without even writing a \"skill\", it nails the execution, and then generated this booklet of examples with only a minimal prompt. ( It made up all the examples itself. ) Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed, the almost instant compilation ", "context": "", "use_case": "generating PDF documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude and Typst \u2013 Examples for AI-Assisted Document Generation [pdf]"}]}, {"label": "Fast compilation", "summary": "Near-instant compilation enables quick iteration and is much faster than LaTeX pipelines.", "quotes": [{"id": 744387904, "item_id": 46524244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524244", "by": "eterm", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed", "excerpt": "I've been finding the reams of markdown that claude generates too difficult to read comfortably, so I switched to asking it to generate PDFs with typst instead. Without even writing a \"skill\", it nails the execution, and then generated this booklet of examples with only a minimal prompt. ( It made up all the examples itself. ) Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed, the almost instant compilation ", "context": "", "use_case": "generating PDF documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude and Typst \u2013 Examples for AI-Assisted Document Generation [pdf]"}, {"id": 735075520, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst renders around ~1000x faster and has better tooling", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}, {"id": 766734048, "item_id": 47920878, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920878", "by": "noelwelsh", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I switched from pandoc / md / LaTex to Typst for my book[2], and have been very happy with it.", "excerpt": "On a quick read of the docs I'm a bit worried Quarkdown doesn't have the right evaluation model for the job. Text layout typically iterates to a fixed point, because adjusting the layout of one part of the document can throw out layout at another part, require another layout pass and so on. Typst has the concept of context[1] for this. I didn't see anything in Quarkdown that seemed similar, though perhaps I missed it", "context": "author writing a book", "use_case": "writing a book", "switched_from": "Pandoc", "story": "Quarkdown \u2013 Markdown with Superpowers"}]}, {"label": "Pandoc integration", "summary": "Works as a Pandoc PDF engine and conversion target from Markdown.", "quotes": [{"id": 776772673, "item_id": 48548292, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548292", "by": "aleks_me2", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "--pdf-engine=typst", "excerpt": "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", "context": "", "use_case": "PDF engine for Pandoc", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 786644689, "item_id": 49165293, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49165293", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I mostly use it for Markdown->Typst these days", "excerpt": "Thank you for Pandoc! I used it for many things over the years, and it was always there as a good option. I mostly use it for Markdown->Typst these days and it does this job very well.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty Years of Pandoc"}, {"id": 776733584, "item_id": 48545849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545849", "by": "raybb", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it has been nothing but amazing", "excerpt": "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 (mo", "context": "publishes books of student essays", "use_case": "producing books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Ecosystem gaps", "summary": "Some notation packages and typographic quality still lag behind LaTeX.", "quotes": [{"id": 735075520, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst renders around ~1000x faster and has better tooling", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}, {"id": 776771616, "item_id": 48548226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548226", "by": "Rochus", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is great. I think they'll catch up to LuaTeX in terms of typographic quality in near future.", "excerpt": "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 Asci", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 756359521, "item_id": 47272470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272470", "by": "kkfx", "date": "2026-03-06", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Typist can't match", "excerpt": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent. The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, fol", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}]}, {"label": "Footnote bugs", "summary": "Footnotes with bibliography references misbehave or appear on the wrong page.", "quotes": [{"id": 776749984, "item_id": 48546874, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546874", "by": "room271", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst has been great for writing my dissertation with one notable exception", "excerpt": "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 pa", "context": "former software developer, theology student", "use_case": "writing dissertation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}]}, {"label": "Syntax quirks", "summary": "Dollar and hash signs need workarounds, and one user dislikes the embedded scripting syntax.", "quotes": [{"id": 776730208, "item_id": 48545638, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545638", "by": "collabs", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use typst for resumes or other documents that I want to keep in git but I need to share with others using PDF.", "excerpt": "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 sig", "context": "", "use_case": "resumes and PDF documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 777554432, "item_id": 48597152, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597152", "by": "sieve", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I like typst.", "excerpt": "I like typst. But I am not a fan of the syntax. I use it as an intermediate format on the way to PDF. A document markup language should avoid building a programming language inside it. Pick python, or lua, or whatever.", "context": "", "use_case": "intermediate format to PDF", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}]}, {"label": "LLM struggles", "summary": "One book author found LLMs struggle with Typst somewhat.", "quotes": [{"id": 776733584, "item_id": 48545849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545849", "by": "raybb", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it has been nothing but amazing", "excerpt": "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 (mo", "context": "publishes books of student essays", "use_case": "producing books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}]}, {"label": "Fragile after translation", "summary": "Running Typst source through machine translation can break compilation.", "quotes": [{"id": 777594720, "item_id": 48599670, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599670", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "enjoy compilation hell", "excerpt": "As an experiment, I recommend to you to put a markdown file into google translate and make pdf via your preferred markdown parser. Now make the corresponding typst document, put it through google translate and enjoy compilation hell.", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}]}], "who": [{"by": "atoav", "context": "freelancer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961412", "date": "2026-10-05"}, {"by": "film42", "context": "builds customer apps", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849757", "date": "2026-09-25"}, {"by": "dwrodri", "context": "used LaTeX heavily in grad school", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847464", "date": "2026-09-25"}, {"by": "commandersaki", "context": "law school student", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754301", "date": "2026-09-18"}, {"by": "meling", "context": "academic", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599583", "date": "2026-06-19"}, {"by": "room271", "context": "former software developer, theology student", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546874", "date": "2026-06-15"}, {"by": "raybb", "context": "publishes books of student essays", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545849", "date": "2026-06-15"}, {"by": "xvilka", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "date": "2026-06-12"}, {"by": "huijzer", "context": "PhD author", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049740", "date": "2026-05-07"}, {"by": "Hendrikto", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "date": "2026-05-07"}, {"by": "noelwelsh", "context": "author writing a book", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47920878", "date": "2026-04-27"}, {"by": "beej71", "context": "writes books in Markdown", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568025", "date": "2026-01-10"}], "tags": ["for academics", "for book authors", "for generating PDFs in apps", "for resumes", "for LaTeX switchers"], "use_cases": ["typesetting", "document typesetting", "typesetting documents", "pdf generation", "typesetting books", "writing documents"], "compared": [{"slug": "latex", "name": "LaTeX", "co": 28, "switched_from": 9, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pandoc", "name": "Pandoc", "co": 11, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "asciidoc", "name": "AsciiDoc", "co": 2, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "libreoffice", "name": "LibreOffice", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "crixet", "name": "Crixet", "co": 1, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "quarkdown", "name": "Quarkdown", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48544396", "title": "Typst 0.15.0", "mentions": 14}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49846640", "title": "Typst makes big strides", "mentions": 6}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48541062", "title": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst", "mentions": 5}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010729", "title": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156750", "title": "Twenty Years of Pandoc", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467697", "title": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine", "mentions": 2}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 4}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 5}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"warn": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 3, "compare": 1}, "2026-05": {"recommend": 4}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 16, "compare": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 2}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 7, "neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 803934240, "item_id": 50245890, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50245890", "by": "lopsotronic", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I seriously recommend a look at Typst. It's like LaTeX for humans.", "excerpt": "Go talk to the browser vendors and have them roll in the CSS L3 PMM[1] specs, which have been in draft for . . . let's see here . . . oh, huh, two decades. I guarantee the instant - the millisecond - that CSS PMM goes into the browser, that is the second the PDF ecosystem goes poof[2]. Aside from all that, back to the core point, it's quite late in the day to restrict HTML to page-based UX. It's been at least a decad", "context": "", "use_case": "document markup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Websites Should Be Printable"}, {"id": 803839152, "item_id": 50239947, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50239947", "by": "Surac", "date": "2026-10-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use mostly typst for pdf generating", "excerpt": "I use mostly typst for pdf generating today i have written different frontends and connectors to transform everything into typ files and templates. I eben use it with sphinx as a backend", "context": "", "use_case": "PDF generation", "switched_from": "", "story": "PaperPilot \u2013 Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP"}, {"id": 803698577, "item_id": 50231161, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50231161", "by": "vikrantrathore", "date": "2026-10-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used to use latex for it earlier but then wanted to move to typst.", "excerpt": "I do not use book for a context, book is the outcome of the development. I am still old school I feel any product should have good documentation and should be available offline, also personally I like physical things so many of them will print and read. I follow a rigorous process I used to follow since 1998, without AI, which is write something like PEP or RFC before starting work on things. So if you look at the wh", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Twelve years of distributed SQLite"}, {"id": 801461472, "item_id": 50091342, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50091342", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-10-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just use Typst for presentations now", "excerpt": "Genuine question: what does Keynote do that PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress doesn't? I'm a bit out of the loop and just use Typst for presentations now, but I'm not suggesting it as an alternative to Keynote for anyone who doesn't mind a compilation step. If PowerPoint is sufficient, it (mostly) works on Linux now: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake", "context": "", "use_case": "presentations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI"}, {"id": 799382592, "item_id": 49961412, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49961412", "by": "atoav", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love typst.", "excerpt": "I love typst. It is a simple way to create reusable layouts and functions that you can fill with dynamic data. E.g. I am a freelancer and made an invoice template where I just have to provide my customers data and the amounts. It automatically renders a QR code that my customer can scan that enters the right IBAN, subject, amount into their banking account (there is a standard for everything). Additionally it calcula", "context": "freelancer", "use_case": "invoices and lab reports", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst 0.15 Contains Multitudes"}, {"id": 797617952, "item_id": 49851122, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49851122", "by": "ethin", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love typst.", "excerpt": "I love typst. It's about time we have an authoring system like it that also let's you publish HTML versions of things you write with it instead of just PDFs. Papers in Academia for the longest time have been PDFs, which screen readers are terrible with, mainly because the PDF format is an abomination, and makes accessibility (let alone interoperability) unnecessarily painful.", "context": "", "use_case": "authoring documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797596865, "item_id": 49849804, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849804", "by": "leephillips", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "write in markdown with math in Typst and convert to LaTeX", "excerpt": "Not the person you\u2019re asking, but I\u2019ll just mention that pandoc has a Typst reader. I use a pandoc filter to write in markdown with math in Typst and convert to LaTeX: https://lee-phillips.org/typstfilters/", "context": "", "use_case": "math markup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797596112, "item_id": 49849757, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849757", "by": "film42", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's just so robust, efficient and works everywhere.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "builds customer apps", "use_case": "generating PDFs in customer apps", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797586272, "item_id": 49849142, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849142", "by": "wxw", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Typst for formatting my resume, and it\u2019s been great.", "excerpt": "I use Typst for formatting my resume, and it\u2019s been great. Models are pretty good at writing it too if you don\u2019t want to learn the syntax.", "context": "", "use_case": "formatting resume", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797585952, "item_id": 49849122, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849122", "by": "hedgehog", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst has a bunch of nice features, it seems like I discover another every time I use it", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "document templates", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 797559424, "item_id": 49847464, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847464", "by": "dwrodri", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Would highly recommend giving it a spin.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "used LaTeX heavily in grad school", "use_case": "creating event invites", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 796068816, "item_id": 49754301, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754301", "by": "commandersaki", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love typst and I really enjoy using their online editor.", "excerpt": "I love typst and I really enjoy using their online editor. Use it heavily for compiling exam prep notes for law school. Even got a few guys in my law school cohort using it and collaborating via their online editor.", "context": "law school student", "use_case": "exam prep notes for law school", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst Makes Big Strides"}, {"id": 796006304, "item_id": 49750394, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750394", "by": "ashton314", "date": "2026-09-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I am a deep enjoyer of Typst. I love it and I use it absolutely everywhere that I can.", "excerpt": "I am a deep enjoyer of Typst. I love it and I use it absolutely everywhere that I can. CeTZ is a really good package, but I still reach for a tool like Omnigraffle if I need to make a really complicated diagram.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "I hate you Microsoft"}, {"id": 791856144, "item_id": 49491009, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491009", "by": "tnelsond4", "date": "2026-08-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I switched to Typst. Pretty impressed by it's Khmer language support. A lot lighter than latex or sile.", "excerpt": "After trying to use libreoffice for typesetting and it being a pain to get the styles and formatting right I switched to Typst. Pretty impressed by it's Khmer language support. A lot lighter than latex or sile.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "LibreOffice", "story": "LibreOffice 26.8 is out \u2013 local first, and with no AI"}, {"id": 791097616, "item_id": 49443601, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49443601", "by": "raybb", "date": "2026-08-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I've really enjoyed Typst the past few years and even made a few books with it.", "excerpt": "I love this use of wasm! I never really got the hang of LaTeX but I've really enjoyed Typst the past few years and even made a few books with it. Have you ever tried that or have thought on it?", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs pdfTeX in the browser via WASM"}, {"id": 786650737, "item_id": 49165671, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49165671", "by": "aleks_me2", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "--pdf-engine=typst", "excerpt": "Thanks also that new reader/writer are also integrated like typst. I use it to create pdfs for my blog posts with that code :-) python3 \"$SCRIPT_DIR/preprocess.py\" > blog-post.md && \\ /datadisk/Downloads/pandoc-3.9/bin/pandoc \\ blog-post.md \\ --pdf-engine=typst \\ --template=\"templates/blog.typ\" \\ -o \"out.pdf\" 2>/tmp/pdf-pandoc-err.txt;", "context": "", "use_case": "PDF engine", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty Years of Pandoc"}, {"id": 786644689, "item_id": 49165293, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49165293", "by": "jwr", "date": "2026-08-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I mostly use it for Markdown->Typst these days", "excerpt": "Thank you for Pandoc! I used it for many things over the years, and it was always there as a good option. I mostly use it for Markdown->Typst these days and it does this job very well.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Twenty Years of Pandoc"}, {"id": 785383808, "item_id": 49086488, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49086488", "by": "abound", "date": "2026-07-28", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using Typst for layout and stuff", "excerpt": "I've been building something similar for my own purposes. Basically, I use Calibre's \"Fetch News\" functionality to get epubs of all the news sources I trust, and then once a month (interval is configurable), I run a pipeline over all of it (some LLM magic, partly local partly API) to dedupe and rank stories, then compile it into an actual honest-to-goodness newspaper (using Typst for layout and stuff), then read that", "context": "", "use_case": "newspaper layout", "switched_from": "", "story": "Delayed Gratification \u2013 Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'"}, {"id": 784193617, "item_id": 49012101, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012101", "by": "d4rkp4ttern", "date": "2026-07-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "typst slides are great looking too, especially with math etc.", "excerpt": "Love it. Like some others here, I've been making html presentations with code-agents and they come out really nice. Other alternatives for that suit different purposes are these: - slidev markdown-based slides, I often have a code-agent make these. https://github.com/slidevjs/slidev - typst slides are great looking too, especially with math etc. Again easy for agents to do One minor nit: Based on the title, I thought", "context": "", "use_case": "presentation slides", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)"}, {"id": 777594720, "item_id": 48599670, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599670", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "enjoy compilation hell", "excerpt": "As an experiment, I recommend to you to put a markdown file into google translate and make pdf via your preferred markdown parser. Now make the corresponding typst document, put it through google translate and enjoy compilation hell.", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}, {"id": 777593328, "item_id": 48599583, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48599583", "by": "meling", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019m in academia and I try to convert everyone I know\u2026", "excerpt": "I\u2019m in academia and I try to convert everyone I know\u2026 I only recently started using it for a few things, and I used Claude to do some pretty advanced stuff that I wouldn\u2019t have ventured to even try with latex. That is, I think a lot of the relevant CTAN packages can be developed using LLMs more quickly than you might expect. For next year, I plan to prepare a thesis template for our university and encourage students ", "context": "academic", "use_case": "academic typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}, {"id": 777565728, "item_id": 48597858, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597858", "by": "aloisdg", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is everything I was expected from latex.", "excerpt": "Markdown is already seen as arcane by non technical folks. Which is sad btw. Typst is not going to replace it. That said I was not a huge latex user and nowadays I use typst a lot. Typst is everything I was expected from latex. The content is in markdown and loaded by typst with cmarker", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}, {"id": 777554432, "item_id": 48597152, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48597152", "by": "sieve", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I like typst.", "excerpt": "I like typst. But I am not a fan of the syntax. I use it as an intermediate format on the way to PDF. A document markup language should avoid building a programming language inside it. Pick python, or lua, or whatever.", "context": "", "use_case": "intermediate format to PDF", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}, {"id": 777551296, "item_id": 48596956, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596956", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use typst countless times a day", "excerpt": "If they need to do typsetting, as mathematicians in fact do. Mathematics breaks the civilized opposition of content and format, because it involves the invention of symbols on the fly. Reasoning about this is actually quite simple but the typst brigaders have no experience with the history of the topic. It is universal that the flood of largely automated hackernews typst brigaders cannot make a single post without fl", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst"}, {"id": 776831040, "item_id": 48551940, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551940", "by": "subset", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's really nice having a decently powerful scripting component, it makes for some fun literate-style programming.", "excerpt": "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 ", "context": "", "use_case": "scripting and typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776784545, "item_id": 48549034, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549034", "by": "memset", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "creating new PDFs along with page numbers and table of contents", "excerpt": "For composition I use musescore. In my case, I\u2019m not actually arranging or writing music - I\u2019m just taking existing music PDFs, separating pages, and creating new PDFs along with page numbers and table of contents. The use case is to have a nice booklet of music for an upcoming performance.", "context": "", "use_case": "assembling music booklet PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776772673, "item_id": 48548292, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548292", "by": "aleks_me2", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "--pdf-engine=typst", "excerpt": "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", "context": "", "use_case": "PDF engine for Pandoc", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776771616, "item_id": 48548226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48548226", "by": "Rochus", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is great. I think they'll catch up to LuaTeX in terms of typographic quality in near future.", "excerpt": "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 Asci", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776764336, "item_id": 48547771, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547771", "by": "flossly", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "An LLM turned all my Latex projects to Typst and I'm not looking back.", "excerpt": "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.", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776749984, "item_id": 48546874, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546874", "by": "room271", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst has been great for writing my dissertation with one notable exception", "excerpt": "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 pa", "context": "former software developer, theology student", "use_case": "writing dissertation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776745840, "item_id": 48546615, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546615", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "typst is what I use", "excerpt": "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", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776743648, "item_id": 48546478, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546478", "by": "memset", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use typst to format sheet music.", "excerpt": "This is awesome! I\u2019ve 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/", "context": "", "use_case": "sheet music booklets and concert programs", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776734512, "item_id": 48545907, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545907", "by": "weinzierl", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.", "excerpt": "\"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.", "context": "", "use_case": "documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776733584, "item_id": 48545849, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545849", "by": "raybb", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "it has been nothing but amazing", "excerpt": "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 (mo", "context": "publishes books of student essays", "use_case": "producing books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776732544, "item_id": 48545784, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545784", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "pandoc -r markdown -w pdf --pdf-engine=typst input.md -o output.pdf", "excerpt": "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", "context": "", "use_case": "markdown to PDF", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776730208, "item_id": 48545638, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545638", "by": "collabs", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use typst for resumes or other documents that I want to keep in git but I need to share with others using PDF.", "excerpt": "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 sig", "context": "", "use_case": "resumes and PDF documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776729520, "item_id": 48545595, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545595", "by": "opto", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "why would I use typst over org-mode or $your_fave_markdown + pandoc?", "excerpt": "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?", "context": "non-developer who writes and produces documents", "use_case": "writing documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776726096, "item_id": 48545381, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545381", "by": "thomascountz", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "HTML support just keeps getting better and better!", "excerpt": "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", "context": "", "use_case": "HTML export", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776262448, "item_id": 48516403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516403", "by": "CJefferson", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst", "excerpt": "I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 776216784, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 768795840, "item_id": 48049740, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049740", "by": "huijzer", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough.", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can\u2019t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it\u2019s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis", "context": "PhD author", "use_case": "writing thesis and book", "switched_from": "", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 768791280, "item_id": 48049455, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "by": "Hendrikto", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used Typst for a few weeks. It already feels much more understandable, consistent, hackable, and customizable.", "excerpt": "I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \\makeatletter \\makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "LaTeX", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 756359521, "item_id": 47272470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272470", "by": "kkfx", "date": "2026-03-06", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Typist can't match", "excerpt": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent. The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, fol", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}, {"id": 744387904, "item_id": 46524244, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524244", "by": "eterm", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed", "excerpt": "I've been finding the reams of markdown that claude generates too difficult to read comfortably, so I switched to asking it to generate PDFs with typst instead. Without even writing a \"skill\", it nails the execution, and then generated this booklet of examples with only a minimal prompt. ( It made up all the examples itself. ) Part of what makes Typst so nice to work with is the speed, the almost instant compilation ", "context": "", "use_case": "generating PDF documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Claude and Typst \u2013 Examples for AI-Assisted Document Generation [pdf]"}, {"id": 735075520, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Typst renders around ~1000x faster and has better tooling", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}]}