Typst if you are a progressive zoomer

I’m a millenial (maybe even an older one but I won’t admit to that) and I just love typst.

Markdown is just content, but as soon as you want actual layouting, you’re in for trouble; sure you can post-process in pandoc and apply the result to some template, but you’re probably creating an abomination in the process. Oh, and I hate creating slightly bigger tables there. One of your columns got larger? Better adjust all your horizontal lines (at least for grid tables), which might be a pandoc markdown only feature. Yeah, there isn’t one single markdown, but multiple flavors: glukhov.org/…/gfm-vs-commonmark-vs-pandoc-markdow…

LaTeX? Probably still the king of exact typesetting, but it has a lot of issues:

• compile times are really bad (especially with something like lualatex)
• TeX which is the foundation of LaTeX maybe isn’t how you’d design such a language today
  • this includes error messages that aren’t helpful if you didn’t study CS and typesetting
• tables (though BIG THANKS to that brave soul who wrote tabularray, it saved my sanity in my last LaTeX project)

Though at least nowadays, you have options for creating accessible PDFs (I’m not a big fan of the idea myself, but there are environments where that support is mandatory, e.g. government contracting)

typst? I wrote my first bigger project in typst that did much more than I could ever do in LaTeX (generation of documentation from OpenAPI spec files) and I had way fewer issues than for LaTeX projects of lower complexity. Yeah there are still some areas that need improvement, but all in all it’s a breeze. With tinymist, writing stuff is just so nice, no waiting for your document to compile for 40 seconds, no, you get an instant preview, or a helpful error message.

I was a bit of a LaTeX guy but I haven’t touched it since I learned typst.