Typst 0.14
66 comments
·October 24, 2025optionalsquid
agentcoops
I used LaTeX for decades and had convinced myself nothing could ever replace it. Just this month, however, I converted to Typst for a large project. Absolutely no regrets: undying respect to the great Knuth, but the experience with Typst is already simply better on almost every axis. I use TinyMist with vscode and the development experience is terrific. I was modifying templates within a day of picking it up, which—-skill issue undoubtedly—-always gave me nightmares in LaTeX.
bobbylarrybobby
100% agree. With tex it feels like when you use a package or template, you're stuck with every choice it made because changing it yourself is just too daunting. With Typst I feel confident that I can go in and muck with whatever I don't like. It's a really refreshing feeling.
WillAdams
The two applications were developed on quite different computers and with quite different toolchains.
Interestingly, Knuth has stated that his development of Literate Programming:
http://literateprogramming.com/
was more important than TeX --- fortunately, his publishing _TeX: The Program_:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/499934.Computers_Typeset...
has been very helpful to folks developing successors and add-ons and new versions, facilitating the creation of web2c and change files which made tools such as pdftex and omega and xetex and luatex possible).
evertedsphere
famously knuth was trying to (and pretty much did) solve digital typesetting not create a nice piece of hci so this is all as it should be or at least as might be expected
imiric
Speaking of skill, learning a new language is always daunting, but I found that LLMs do a pretty good job of generating Typst code. I relied on that a lot for generating snippets of code, and learning about the language, which would've taken me more time otherwise. Although the Typst docs are pretty good, regardless.
jadodev
TinyMist is a great alternative to the online editor for local development in VS Code / Cursor https://myriad-dreamin.github.io/tinymist/
optionalsquid
Yeah, that's also what I've been using, and yes it is very good. Thank you for bringing it up
s777
The online editor is extremely useful for quick projects with other people where real-time editing works better than git, and where people don't want to download tools.
imiric
This is a great example of the open core model done right. Have a fully-featured F/LOSS product, and build value-add commercial products and services on top of it.
I've also only used the CLI tool, and didn't miss any features from it. The commercial product was never pushed or promoted to me. I personally have no need for it, and I'm only vaguely aware that it exists. But I'm sure that people who do need the friendlier UI/UX and more advanced features would be willing to pay for it, so I'm glad that the team has a stable source of income that enables them to continue maintaining the project in the long-term.
Looking at the pricing page now... Wow, the plans are quite generous and affordable. Way to go!
croes
It’s a great example how many open source projects start … until they change.
mastax
> Meanwhile, in HTML and SVG export, PDFs are converted to an embedded SVG on-the-fly. And, finally, in PNG export and the web app preview, PDFs are rasterized. All of this PDF processing functionality lives right in the Typst compiler, with no system dependencies. This is only possible thanks to the amazing work of community member @LaurenzV, who created a new PDF processing library called hayro from scratch. The library is 100% written in the programming language Rust (which is also the language we use for the Typst compiler) and is thus highly portable.
Wow! That must’ve been quite an effort.
lukax
And the hayro library is standalone and can easily be used outside of Typst. It only uses CPU and is pure Rust so it can also be used with WebAsembly. Link to demo below.
cbolton
Indeed... I wonder to what extent the author of hayro did this work specifically for Typst or if they would have done it anyway.
Vallaaaris
Author here! Resolving one of the most-requested Typst features was definitely a big motivation for me, but I wouldn't say this was the only reason. I've done a lot of previous work on PDF (see e.g. the krilla library, although also mostly in the context of Typst), so I was already pretty familiar with how PDF works. In addition to that, I also just finished writing my master's thesis about 2D rendering (also in Rust), so I also gained a lot of knowledge in that area. Therefore, this project seemed like a good opportunity for me to create a bigger open source project myself that I could work on in my free time. :)
mwcampbell
Would it be feasible, with hayro-interpret and krilla, to take an existing PDF and round-trip each of the pages while wrapping the contents in marked content spans and adding tags, to remediate the accessibility of an existing PDF? Round-tripping each of the page content streams through a full-featured PDF interpreter seems cleaner than trying to edit in-place. PDFium can round-trip the content streams and add the marked content spans, but can't do the tagging. What do you think?
cbolton
Thanks for sharing the background. It's impressive work. Makes me curious about your thesis... Is it publicly available?
pbronez
Thanks for your contribution!
IshKebab
And a job offer I hope!
JustFinishedBSG
I think I'm going to subscribe without any intention of using the app just as a "financing" donation.
I love, and hate, LaTeX and the idea of a LaTeX successor / alternative is incredibly appealing.
And the fact that they are aware that microtypography IS important and that they are working on it is a huge huge plus.
dev_hugepages
Typst is open source, so you can run it on your computer; it's available as a CLI and has integrations with multiples IDEs (most use tinymist). Using typst is better than subscribing and not using it IMO because you can already start creating content and advocating for it, while telling the team about bugs or pain points
tcfhgj
you can use the cli, subscribe (to the pro features of the app) and not use the app (online editor) to provide a bit of financial support WHILE using Typst and create content
JustFinishedBSG
Exactly my plan yes :)
garganzol
LaTex is not too bad but it's hard to cook properly. My personal pain point with LaTex is that it depends so much on environment where it runs.
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.
amai
There are already some Tufte-inspired templates available for Typst:
elashri
The killer features of LaTeX that does not let me go with typst (Although I like my typst generated resume) as an academic are.
1. Beamer, I create multiple slide decks per week and the out of the box setup that beamer provides with different styles and fonts for different needs are unmatched. The efforts to generate some of this on typst is not there yet.
2. Generating figures using tikz and be able to modify it on the source file. Because I don't bear using GUI tools. And now life is easier that LLM can help you with complex tikz generation.
3. Not that it is actually a point but I am used now to overleaf and I have professional account as CERN member. It is also better on collaboration level and features than typst cloud.
I hope that one day typst will grow into this direction so that I can stop using LaTeX. Until then I have couple of overleaf templates generated for my use.
dev_hugepages
Maybe you have already checked these, but in case you haven't: - https://touying-typ.github.io/ Creating slides in Typst - https://cetz-package.github.io/ CeTZ is a package that allows for drawing with Typst with an API inspired by TikZ and Processing. It also provides plotting and chart libraries and is used in several other packages to create circuit, fretboard and more diagrams - maybe try getting your team to use version control? You may this that it's a lost cause, but existing version control schemes (like git) work very great for textual formats, including with LaTeX or Typst
tapia
If you make a lot of slides with latex, then it is definitely worth it to try typst. I have a lot of presentations in latex for lectures and such things, with many animated tikz figures. But the compilation times are huge. At some point it is very time consuming to iterate. With typst, it compiles so fast that you don't have to fear to start a compilation. I finish my presentations much faster now.
Cetz has been working very good for me. I was really unsure that it could replace tikz for my applications. But apparently, as long as you have good geometrical primitives (lines, rectangle, circles, etc) you can do a lot. Also it is much nicer to program and make real functions with typst. It is true, the typst options to replace beamer are still not quite there in comparison, but they are definitely in a very useful state. See for example typst-presentate [1].
fmoralesc
Some quick remarks:
1) I have been using typst to create slides with some success. Adding special features tends to be simpler than in beamer.
2) cetz (https://github.com/cetz-package/cetz) works quite well and is comparable to tikz in complexity and capability. of course, there is more support for tikz, but it is bound to improve over time.
meatjuice
1 and 2 are already in the typst ecosystem. What you really need is a professional account as CERN member,on Typst.
WillAdams
Anyone using this for Literate Programming?
A quick search found:
https://github.com/litProgTypst/ (which I'm mystified by)
and
https://github.com/denkspuren/typst_programming (which hasn't been updated in two years)
Not seeing anything specific at: https://typst.app/docs/reference/scripting
I need to re-write my current project https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview again --- maybe this would be a good fit? The unique feature I am taking advantage of is writing out code blocks in separate files, then concatenating them using .lua so there's no differentiation betwixt tangle/weave, both happen, and since it's Python, no need for a compile step either.
decatur
We used GitHub/Azure markdown plus Mermaid plus MathJax for financial model documentation. Beyond a certain complexity this really hurts.
Now we use typst, both playground (which does not call home, so no document exfiltration) or the compiler. The compiler is super easy to install, as we already have the Rust build chain installed. Compared to Tex, the 40 odd years newer design of typst makes all the difference.
pbronez
FYI - Typst will sell you a self-hostable version of the webapp.
seanwilson
> To make sure you got everything right, you can enable the new PDF/UA-1 export. PDF/UA is an international standard that helps to create universally accessible PDF files. When it is enabled, Typst will run additional checks against your document to find accessibility issues and optimize for accessibility rather than compatibility. It will find issues such as missing document titles, wrong heading hierarchies, and missing alternative descriptions.
This sounds great! Are accessible PDFs possible with LaTeX? Last time I looked, it wasn't a standard feature and there didn't seem to be any easy workaround which is a real problem when there's a requirement to produce accessible PDFs.
cbolton
LaTeX has made great progress on this front in the past years and results are now available in TeX Live 2025. Compared to Typst, on one hand the tagging is still opt-in [1]. On the other hand, LaTeX already targets PDF/UA-2 including automatic tagging for math formulas, while Typst currently targets PDF/UA-1, so you have to tag the math formulas manually, like an image. This is evolving fast though: yesterday a draft PR for Typst was opened[2] to add support for MathML Core, which I guess is a big step towards automatic tagging of math since the math tags in PDF/UA-2 are based on MathML.
Another thing to consider is compatibility of third-party packages: LaTeX packages often require adjustements and many important packages work now but many still don't work, including some big ones like Beamer and tufte-book [3]. I think Typst packages should require fewer adjustments, thanks to the way "show rules" work: a package (or the user) can write a show rule to transform an element for rendering, but Typst automatically retains the semantic meaning of the original element.
[1] https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/documentation/usage...
[2] https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/7206
[3] https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/tagging-status/
amai
Have a look at
https://typst.app/universe/package/soviet-matrix
This is a classic Tetris game implemented using Typst!
fsh
This is great! Having PDFs as a native image format removes one of the biggest hurdles for replacing LaTeX with Typst.
dgacmu
I literally was just working around this two days ago with muchpdf and now it's built in. Woo.
maxc01
Wondering how this compares to Emacs org mode, which support exports to PDF slides with beamer or plain PDF document, also support to export to lots of other format. It also allows running the embedded code and export the results. Of course embedding PDF is easy.
hbn
> alt: "Diagram with two rectangles. The first is labelled 'Tagged PDF'. An arrow points to the second, labelled 'Accessibility'"
Not trying to make any statement but I'd love to see how this level of alt text detail scales to a diagram that's more than a rectangle pointing to a rectangle
There's usually some confusion about this, so to clarify in advance:
- The Typst online editor is proprietary: https://typst.app
- The Typst compiler/CLI is open source: https://github.com/typst/typst
I hear that the online editor is quite good, but personally I've only ever used the CLI.
I originally picked up Typst as yet another replacement for PowerPoint (replacing my use of Marp), but have since used it for a poster and some minor text documents. And I've been very happy the results. I know that a lot of people love using LaTeX for that kind of thing, and with good reasons, but I always forgot most of the details between my (occasional) use of LaTeX, while I've found Typst to be very easy to return to