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 been meaning to learn LaTeX but never got around to it. I write documents in markdown and convert to PDF, but would like to have some rich typesetting.
For anyone who has ever used both, would you recommend learning this or LaTeX for non-academic use case?
Typst is way simpler to learn, especially if you’re used to markdown. You can first approach it as a markup language like markdown, but with some scripting.
Package management in LaTeX is infuriatingly bad, you can’t even specify the version you want to use.
I can only speak for myself but I like Typst a lot more than LaTeX. Typst compiles instantly and the markup language is very reasonable. LaTeX by comparison is slow and arcane, with a macro language that is unlike anything else in common use today. It also has pretty awful defaults to be honest, especially if you’re writing in a language that isn’t English. There are a few things that Typst can’t quite do, but that gap is shrinking as well.
Edit: This blog post has some examples and showcases a lot of the core functionality, including the scripting. Typst has a playground which you can use to get a feel for the basics (though installing it locally isn’t a massive pain either, unlike LaTeX). Overleaf allows trying LaTeX in the browser for free as well, although only with an account (partly because LaTeX tooling is a pain and expensive in CPU resources).
As someone who used LaTeX for many years and then switched over to Typst, I see no reason to use LaTeX these days. Typst syntax is more readable and it is much nicer to write.
Especially if you’re coming from markdown, I think Typst is the better choice. Typst syntax is very similar to markdown for the simple things and more advanced things are like any super high level programming language.