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by AlanYx 820 days ago
Typst is exciting, but I wish their roadmap would prioritize features in common use in LaTeX like microtype rather than niche new features like style revocation.
3 comments

Yeah, I'm curious if anyone with experience has comments on the typography quality of Typst, or whether that's even a focus at this point in time. There are a million document languages (DocBook, AsciiDoc, Markdown+extensions, LaTeX, etc etc) but LaTeX has the foothold it does (other than academic entrenchment) because of the output quality.

I sometimes use Typst as an intermediate renderer with Pandoc, but for my highest quality work I insist on features like protrusion. I was using LibreOffice just yesterday and actually had to check multiple times whether there was a space at the beginning of the line because the lack of protrusion support meant unsightly visual gaps.

Probably not as developed as microtype, but they have overhang, kerning and ligatures: https://typst.app/docs/reference/text/text
Microtype features are already incorporated. See this issue: https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/261#issuecomment-14886...
The only microtype feature currently supported in typst is overhang, and only for seven hardcoded punctuation characters. See the code here:

https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/10a3fbd174fc1a3f95937c91...

It's basically a kludge; there's a lot more work needed to actually implement even overhang properly.