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by LegibleCrimson 941 days ago
> The compiler is open source, and written in rust.

Wow, that's really appealing to me; thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking "well, this looks nicer than LaTeX, and I'm really frustrated with LaTeX, but I really don't want to jump right into a big WYSIWYG thing". Now I'm really interested. Most of the other "replacements" suffer in some big ways (Markdown and RST/Sphinx are great for structured content, but not great for meticulous control over the presentation).

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/typst/typst

...

$ printf 'Total displaced soil by glacial flow:\n\n$ 7.32 beta +\n sum_(i=0)^nabla Q_i / 2 $\n' > file.typ

$ typst compile file.typ output.pdf

And I've got a cool rendered PDF with a math formula!

I'm very keen now to see exactly how flexible, robust, and extensible this is. LaTeX can do basically anything, but you pay for the power in blood. I would love a typesetting system that isn't horribly painful to extend.

1 comments

I think they were very careful to have the same expressivity as latex. It’s basically a whole language with a human-friendly syntax.

Their discord channel has a bunch of community plugins if you want a showcase. It’s not yet as big as latex, obviously, but I think it already has the critical mass to make it a sound choice.