[raybb]

I'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with.

I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mostly via LLMs). From there, I generate both a nice digital PDF and a print-ready PDF using Typst, and then use Pandoc again to convert the Typst into what ultimately becomes an EPUB.

It all works quite beautifully. Most of the challenges I've run into are related to Typst features that don't map cleanly to Pandoc, so I end up adding a few funky conditionals so those features aren't hit when converting via Pandoc. sys.inputs makes that very easy https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/11588

The books in question: https://thelabofthought.co/shop

[weinzierl]

"LLMs struggle with Typst a bit"

My experience is the opposite. Especially when instructing the LLM to do very fine grained and detailed adjustments. Works like a charm.

Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.

[echoangle]

I had the same experience as the root commenter. Sometimes ChatGPT seems to generate invalid typst code that doesn’t even compile. Maybe the syntax changed and it did work at some point but some stuff looked so wrong that I would guess it just doesn’t have enough training data for proper typst generation without feeding examples into the context first.