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by AnonymousPlanet 705 days ago
Typst is missing vital features to produce professional looking documents. Latex and Adobe InDesign use paragraph based algorithms for line breaks and hyphenation (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380111102 for Latex). That is the main reason why papers written in Word look so amateurish. Proper support for footnotes seems to be also lacking in Typst.

Footnotes might be handled properly in a future version of Typst. Regarding paragraph formatting I'm not so optimistic. I've read the thesis and papers by one of the Typst authors. They either don't seem to be aware of better approaches or they simply don't care about aesthetics.

Edit: Another thing that irks me about Typst is that it does not seem to be a purely not-for-profit project. It is tightly entangled with their commercial offering, whatever that might mean for the future of the "free" version.

1 comments

I'm not sure what you're referring to because when justification is enabled Typst uses almost the same line breaking algorithm as TeX. [1]

One problem we had was over-eager hyphenation. We've addressed that recently. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/9b001e21121ab7b5645aa36f...

[2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4584

That is great news! It wasn't there the last time I checked. Maybe I missed it. Thanks for clarifying!