[spudlyo]

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it.

Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's not something you can do in Markdown.

[bachmeier]

I've been rewriting all my papers in Rust. It's been a pleasant experience getting memory safe coffee stains on my papers.

[vlod]

Surely coffeescript would have been more appropriate?

[0]: https://coffeescript.org/

[anu7df]

Does coffee accelerate rusting?

[semi-extrinsic]

Depends on the acidity.

[tristanlukens]

Blazingly fast papers!

[throwaway17_17]

I know it was probably said just as a joke, but are you really writing papers using Rust? I don’ t use Rust, BUT if you’ve got a better way to write symbol heavy type theory and/or logic than having to make PNG’s and put them in as images in a word processor I would love to hear about it.

[eru]

You might like what people have cooked up with Racket.

[fourthark]

Thankfully there is a Typst port of this package!

https://typst.app/universe/package/fleck/

[philistine]

That package still has the core limitation of Typst: images can only be placed top-middle-bottom and left-centre-right. Typst still has yet to support arbitrarily placed images.

[doerig]

You mean absolutely positioning it? You can do that with the place function and displacing it with dx/dy from the origin (https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place). Example: #place(top + left, dy: 2cm, dx: 4cm, image("image.png"))

[philistine]

That seems usable for manual layout, but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page. I reuse my LaTeX code to make volumes of books, and I never touch the code. It's fire and forget for me, which this does not seem to solve.

[tcfhgj]

> but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page.

they end up exactly at the specified location?

[antonvs]

Presumably they're referring to the ability to parameterize the target page size. In that case, absolute coordinates don't work well (if at all).

[widforss]

> two splashes with light colours

Blood. That's blood.

[alexitosrv]

Typst requires a signup? It's web? It says developed in the open, but the main page also offers a login. What can you about latex vs typst?

[buo]

The compiler is open-source and can be run locally. You need an account if you want to use their web editor, which is nice (it shows error messages where they occur along with an explanation and link to docs, and also shows a real-time updated preview).

As for Latex vs Typst, as a language Typst is much better, compiles very quickly, and has sane error messages. However, Typst still has a few rough edges, and can't do everything you can with Latex + packages (yet).

I've been using Typst for most of my documents for a few months and I've been generally happy with it.

[cbolton]

You can use the online editor without login: https://typst.app/play/

[ted_dunning]

No. Typst is an open source application.

There is a very prominent web site that offers a hosted version without much clarity about the fact that you can run it yourself. The hosted version offers collaborative editing similar to what Overleaf provides which is incredibly useful.

See https://github.com/typst/typst for the CLI version

There is a page with pre-compiled binaries as well and on Macs, you can install using homebrew.

[tombert]

I have never really used the web thing personally. I always use the command line version, and it works perfectly fine and it's FOSS.

I find the syntax to Typst to be generally better than LaTeX. I don't like its equations as much, but Typst has one huge advantage that makes it easier to forgive its faults: it compiles several orders of magnitude faster than LaTeX. This might not sound like much but it honestly sort of changes how you even think about problems. I keep Neovim open on the left, run `typst watch` in the background, and Evince on the right, and my updates show up immediately upon saving.

Also, adding plugins and libraries is trivial. All you have to do is declare it at the top of the file and it will automatically fetch it, which is considerably easier than LaTeX.

I don't like the default font it ships with, but it's easy enough to add a Latin Modern font and get something that looks like LaTeX.

Before Typst, I had typically been using Pandoc with Markdown to write my documents, and that served me well for quite awhile, but it had the disadvantage of being extremely slow to compile. A slide deck that I gave last year [1] would take a bit more than a minute to compile. This became an issue because I had to make a few small last-minute changes and having to wait an entire minute to view them actually made it so I was really pushing against the wire.

If I had done my slides in Typst, they would have compiled in about 40 milliseconds, they wouldn't have looked any worse, and I'd have a syntax not dissimilar to Markdown. I'm pretty much a convert at this point.

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~tombert/lambda_days_2025

[_flux]

The financial aspect of the project is the service they sell, core is open: https://github.com/typst/typst

What the core lacks is the web service that offers e.g. collaborative editing.

[quantummagic]

Typst is an application you can use on your local machine without any signup. The compiler is hosted on GitHub. The Typst web app (the online editor at typst.app) is closed source and offered as a paid with cloud storage, collaboration, autocomplete, etc...

[kzrdude]

You can start using typst by installing it using rust tooling (that's one way to install it): `cargo install typst-cli`

Or install it using vscode's extensions, or install it for neovim using mason. That's a few commonly used distribution paths.

[asimeqi]

The best coffee stains by far are created directly in Postscript.

[ahazred8ta]

Hanno's original coffee ring page from 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20100719202509/http://hanno-rein...

[ihaveajob]

I'd say the best ones are created by coffee...

[jbrnh]

There was the GIMP Coffee stain filter (though it looks like it is not included in Gimp 3). https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/script-fu-coffee-stain.html

[__mharrison__]

I know it would be easier in typst than using this library... Ducks.

[mrichman]

I came here to say this! I switched to Typst a couple of months ago and won't be going back.