I Did Not Know: Typst

I recently started working with Typst on a personal project, and it’s been a great experience so far, even though I didn’t know about it before last week. I love it when this happens!

I wanted intentional and thoughtful control over styled PDF output, modularity, and the ability to automate easily and efficiently. I’d recently done something interesting with the docx module in Node.js, and it has those virtues if a Word file is your preferred output.

I started down the traditional LaTeX route (or more accurately, layers wrapped around LaTeX) - but no thanks. I have a soft spot in my heart for both scientific writing as well as tried and true tools, but it’s not for me, or at least not for this.

Typst does the job, the documentation is robust, and it has lots of useful functionality I didn’t expect. It’s also unbelievably fast. There are a million things I don’t know, but I’m glad I know about this one now.

Check it out: https://typst.app/