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Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX

In this article, we explore Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. We explore its syntax, current uses and possible uses; we test its scripting system, which is incredibly powerful; we compare it with LaTeX, Markdown and Word, which can be used in similar roles; and we explore its applicability to the task of automatically generating documents from templates, such as in automatic invoice, certificate or report generation.

In particular, Markdown provides no facilities to have all section titles be in Arial 12 point bold al dente typeface, which may be required by the journal to which you want to submit your awesome paper A table of contents is similarly composed of lines of text, but they aren’t any random lines of text: a table of contents gets its data from the headings/section names that are defined elsewhere in a document, and presents them in order, maybe preserving their hierarchy (e.g. subsections are presented indented relative to their parent section), where each entry may have its page number (which, again, is a PDF-specific concept that makes no sense in the Web, where each page is on an infinitely tall container) displayed at the right side, with a character (e.g. Or they may be providing a higher-level API over lower-level functions that already exist on Typst, such as the cetz package, which eventually resolves its shapes to raw visualization calls, in terms of lines, ellipses and polygons.

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