[netbioserror]

First-gen 50-year-old open source suffers from a first-mover problem of not knowing how people will use the thing. Thus, 50 years later, we end up with multiple-gigabyte distributions and messy, inconsistent syntactic approaches to hack together what people want and need.

Typst has 50 years of accumulated TeX experiences to learn from, and fit everything people actually want to use into a 45M binary, and maybe you'll download a few dozen K of package scripts.

I have used it for much more than academic publishing (book, brochure, and even card layout) and it's hands-down the best tool ever made for producing documents of any imaginable kind. Procedurally producing layouts from first-class JSON and CSV support is bliss.