[sprinkly-dust]

Having composed many pieces of coursework using Typst, I must say that it certainly makes academic writing more streamlined, engaging, and dare I say fun — though that might just be me. The functional nature of Typst's syntax ensures I don't have the erratic behaviour emblematic of modern day Microsoft Word and sometimes even Google Docs. Using a local IDE such as VSCode brings all the features one could like.

In comparison to LaTeX, overall document typesetting is far more straightforward. However, for long multi-page stretches of equations solving, I feel that LaTeX is easier to type than Typst because its syntax is not that of a functional programming language but more akin to markdown. Thus, one does not need to think as far in advance when typesetting equations with lots of functions, superscript, and subscript.

[gumbojuice]

Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that, journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges to LaTeX/Word would fall in place.

For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source).

Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles to LaTeX.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Typst is missing vital features to produce professional looking documents. Latex and Adobe InDesign use paragraph based algorithms for line breaks and hyphenation (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380111102 for Latex). That is the main reason why papers written in Word look so amateurish. Proper support for footnotes seems to be also lacking in Typst.

Footnotes might be handled properly in a future version of Typst. Regarding paragraph formatting I'm not so optimistic. I've read the thesis and papers by one of the Typst authors. They either don't seem to be aware of better approaches or they simply don't care about aesthetics.

Edit: Another thing that irks me about Typst is that it does not seem to be a purely not-for-profit project. It is tightly entangled with their commercial offering, whatever that might mean for the future of the "free" version.

[tapia]

The only thing I need to start writing more serious documents with Typst is an equivalent to latexdiff. But I really think (and hope) that this will replace latex in the future. Alone the compilation time makes it so much nice to use! Meanwhile I am supporting them by having a pro account, which is not even so expensive.

[2cynykyl]

Arxiv will accept a rendered pdf, no source files required. Are any special features unlocked if source files are uploaded?

[thomas34298]

FWIW there is already partial LaTeX support for Typst via the mitex package:

https://github.com/mitex-rs/mitex

[returningfory2]

This is interesting! However, I suspect general TeX support in Typst is probably impossible unless you re-implement the entirety of TeX within Typst somehow. The TeX language has some really terrible properties. For example, the tokenization rules can be dynamically changed at runtime based on the output that has already been produced. E.g. you can write a TeX file that says "typeset this paragraph, and if the result is an odd number of lines, change the meaning of A from letter to open brace". Thus, fully supporting TeX within Typst would seem to require making all of the internals of Typst available to the TeX runtime.

[aragilar]

Is that just common constructs, or can I pull in amsmath and other similar packages?

[crngefest]

As someone who almost never needs equations, does this have any benefits to me over using markdown?

[Winsaucerer]

You've had some good replies already, but just want to add my thoughts. Markdown to me is more about (a) the content (the actual words) and (b) the semantics (text emphasis, headings, etc, which communicate information about the importance or meaning of particular things).

Typesetting systems like Typst or LaTeX go beyond this. They're also about presentation, how precisely it is laid out, on mediums such as print or PDF. Is that something you need? If you care more about the content and its meaning, and are happy to have it rendered differently in different situations (a preview in Visual Studio Code, or passed through a markdown-to-html renderer, or viewed in Obsidian, etc), then Markdown might not just be fine, it may be preferable. But if you need to do things like print this on paper for mailing, email in a PDF, that sort of thing, then you'll want something more.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

I would say probably not.

Markdown is really more about getting words down in plain text with a very simple structure for rendering on the web.

Typst and LaTex make stark distinctions between composing and typesetting. They are programmatic typesetting systems with very structured and fine grained control over the look and design of a document once it's compiled and rendered as a PDF.

If all you're doing is writing prose then I honestly think typesetting programs are overkill unless you do want very fine grained control over how your documents look.

[constantcrying]

Typst deals with documents, so if you want to prepare an actual document, with a defined page layout, style, font, etc. typst gives you that.

Markdown does not do any of that, it just gives you html.

You would want to use typst if you want to create a document and need to control how that document looks from the language itself. Even if you were to render the markdown html to a PDF, markdown itself, or even css doesn't give you control over many parameters of the output document.

There basically is no competition between the tools, they target different output formats.

[PartiallyTyped]

You have more control over the style and structure. If you use markdown + css, that's a different story.

[tengwar2]

What are you doing with Markdown? My own requirements for a format are:

* 30 year viability. * simple but explicit formatting: I need to specify font size, underline, and red text. * clarity in writing is almost as important as clarity in reading, so I am not fond of formatting directives mixed in with text.

That led me to RTF, since Markdown fails on the second and third point, and LaTeX fails on the last. But you have to determine your own requirements from your use case.

[ksynwa]

It depends on what you are doing with your markdown files. For example, if you are using them as the source for a statically generated website typst won't do much for you.

[WolfOliver]

With or without equations, just use MonsterWriter. It gives you LaTeX results without needing to know what LaTeX is.

But, yes LaTeX has other benefits, e.g. citing references, or creating PDFs according to layout and typesettings best practices.