Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex (github.com)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

    Markdown -> XML (XHTML) -> TeX -> PDF

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Typst is also a programming language for document production, however they made the decision to make the code side an actual scripting language, which makes writing custom logic much easier than in Latex.

It does not.

I am using pandoc to transfer some of my notes to the web: https://ykonstant1.github.io/power-draft.html

  for input in *.tex; do
   pandoc "${input}"                      \
          --from latex                    \
          --to html                       \
          --pdf-engine=latexmk            \
          --css="styles/texstyle.css"     \
          --standalone                    \
          --mathjax                       \
          --toc                           \
          --number-sections               \
          --output="${input%".tex"}.html" ;
  done

  pandoc 3.1.9
  Features: +server +lua
  Scripting engine: Lua 5.4

> Yes, latex's HTML output is fairly good nowadays, after a lot of people made very heroic efforts to put it in a system never intended to support it.

Mind saying more? Didn't know there'd been progress here.

Nothing in his comment suggested he was unaware of that so I'm not sure why you're asking.

So? If I'm a modern user who needs my typesetting system to generate HTML, I'm not going to "forgive" a typesetting system because it's older than the web and use it even though it doesn't do what I need.

I would prefer some tool that generates better e-books, like an improved ePub format with better equations and tables.

This division between web and PDF is meaningless to me. The ePub format is a book format based on Web technologies.

A better book format is to the benefit of everyone. To believe HTML can only make websites is counterproductive here.

I make PFDs in LaTeX because I am asked to use it, not because I believe it is a good format.

I mean, the same is true for Emacs. But that hasn't stopped other editors (e.g. VSCode) from developing large vibrant communities of users and tooling.

Regulatory requirements mandate that. Stock brokers in India are required to generate this document called “Contract Notes” which includes all the trades done by the user on the stock exchanges. It also contains a breakdown of all charges incurred by the user (brokerage, various taxes etc). And this has to be emailed to every user before the next trading session begins.

Having used ReportLab a bunch, I'd agree it's a good solution, but not maybe on the more mediocre side of good. Generating LaTeX was a better solution for me, and while I haven't used it, Typst looks a lot better.

Hey. Yes we did support them financially from our FOSS fund. We’ll be happy to do it once more as well.

I think we don't reach that much quantity, but we do a hefty number. What for? Invoices!

We're having problems because until now PDFs are being generated by the ERP system, and it can't keep pace. I know there's a Dev team working on a microservice for PDF generation, but never thinked about doing it with Typst.

I think I'm going to send them @mr-karan link.

Awesome, thanks!

I didn't know about math classes, thank you for the reference

The issue I have with delimiters is that there is no option for "big", but only for "140%" or whatever, making it harder to be consistent Someone created an issue on this on GitHub if I remember correctly

And automatically chosen sizes are often too large

But the feature I'm talking about comes out of the box. One just writes

\documentclass[twoside]{article}

\pagestyle{headings}

in LaTeX. And this also does the right thing on special pages like table of content, appendix, bibliography etc.

Implementing all that in Typst is quite a hassle.

Maintaining this project myself would cause me more problems than it solves.