Typst is a new markup-based typesetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use. [1.1]
References
- Type: Webpage. Title: “typst/typst”. Publisher: “GitHub”. Published (Modified): 2026-03-16T09:39:55.000Z. Accessed: 2025-03-18T08:55Z. URI: https://github.com/typst/typst.
- Type: File. Title: “README.md”.
- Type: Text. Location: ¶1.
- Type: File. Title: “README.md”.
I’ve used both and while Typst is very impressive and usable, it still has not reached feature parity with LaTeX. That being said, there are some aspects to Typst that are either do not exist in LaTeX or are extremely user unfriendly. Tables for instance, are very easy to import into Typst and can be done directly from a CSV file. I’ve also personally taken advantage of the YAML import feature to automatically generate appendices from notes that could not reasonably fit into a table. I’ve definitely had my fair share of experiences wrestling with Typst to do things that are trivial in LaTeX but overall I have a good experience with it. I use it for some report writing at work (and I use a latex-like report template) and so far prefer it to LaTeX. I suggest you try it out and see if it works for you.
Could you share some of these experiences? 🙂
One issue i had with typst that was never an issue with LaTeX is dealing with big documents. One of the reports I was putting together had a very big appendix with a lot of images. I run typst locally and it autocompiles as you write, but with more images, it uses more RAM and everything slows down. The problem I had was that the thing would crash every time I tried to write anything. I turned off automobile and do it manually now, but it still cant so the full document with the appendix. My work around was to compile the appendix separately and in ten page increments, then merge the pdfs afterwards. This sort of thing would never be an issue in LaTeX with the added convenience of draft mode for big documents with lots of figures.
In fairness, this behavior is definitely a result of some bug and compiling everything is still significantly faster than LaTeX.
Another thing that kind of bothers me is references. I am a big fan of the natbib way of writing \citet or \citep. In Typst, you normally type “@Doe2026” and it produces a normal citation like \citep, but if you want anything else, you have to use the far more cumbersome #cite command or define a custome function. Its not that big of a deal but still annoying for me.
What, in your opinion, do you think it’s still lacking?
Thank you very much!