- typst is a promising alternative to latex for technical writing
- typst syntax is close enough to tex/markdown that If you guess it'll work, it typically does
- latex is a bloated mess with a byzantine set of interlocking dependencies
- Pandoc/markdown writing is fine but uses tex on the back end, but this is just kicking the can down the road
- Quarto is building support for typst in their new release, which should hopefully aid adoption
- it is actively developed and can be installed from the releases page here
- I wrote myself a quick build system for it in sublime text (which I stubbornly continue to use for writing because it is lean and feels snappier than vscode, which I use for almost all my programming tasks)
- This file is stored in `<sublime_config_dir>/User/typst.sublime-build` where <sublime_config_dir> depends on your OS. You can open it in your file manager using `Preferences > Browse Packages` on sublime.
{ "shell_cmd": "typst watch \"$file_name\" & okular \"$file_base_name\".pdf", "selector": "source.lua", "working_dir": "$file_path", "path": "/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin:$PATH" }- This lets me hit `ctrl+b` once when I initially start writing a typst file to ask typst to *watch* a file, which typst interprets as
- Compile the file now
- Then watch for changes, so every time I save the `.typ` document file, it gets recompiled into pdf instantaneously
- Interactive use looks like this
- Syntax highlighting is set to `lua` because I don't write lua and the keywords seem to match
- This this is also easy to achieve with other editors (just run the equivalent of `typst watch` in an inbuilt console, e.g. on vscode or nvim)
- It also has an overleaf-like web client that runs without any local installation