First impressions with Typst

by Sam Estep, 2025-03-27

Typst is a modern alternative to LaTeX. I've been interested in it for a while: it promises to be both more user-friendly and far more performant than LaTeX. Unfortunately, though, it'll probably be quite some time before it's a real option for academic publishing in computer science. arXiv requires TeX source code, as do many conferences.

But today I had an excuse to try it out: I'm not required to use TeX for my thesis proposal! What better way to procrastinate than by trying a new tool? Actually, I've gone through the Typst tutorial before, but I forgot everything since then, so I still count this as a first impression.

The good

It's so easy to just get started writing: unlike LaTeX, you can just type in a completely empty file and those words will show up immediately in the rendered document. And obviously the near-instant rendering speed is just night and day compared to every LaTeX engine I've used.

I've never considered myself "good at" TeX so this is probably just a skill issue, but I found it quite easy to getting some basic formatting going (e.g. for the first page of a thesis proposal), since the syntax feels familiar (kinda similar to Markdown) and is generally lighter-weight than LaTeX.

There seems to be some pretty smart behavior for automatically scrolling the rendered view to where you're typing. For instance, I was looking at the autogenerated table of contents, and I added a new #pagebreak() and section heading at the bottom of the document; the view stayed where it was and continuously updated as I typed the section title. Then when I hit Enter and started typing the section contents, it immediately scrolled down to the bottom of the document.

I tested this further by going back and forth between typing in a couple different sections, and I noticed that it only jumped when I typed a non-whitespace character. At first I thought this was because it only jumps on a "visible" change, but then I realized that's not the case: I tried typing an extra space in the middle of a sentence, and it still jumped even though that space didn't appear in the rendered output. So I guess it just trims whitespace from the end of a paragraph.
Interestingly, it only seems to jump when adding characters, not when deleting them.
Unlike Overleaf, I don't see a button you can just click to scroll the rendered output to the point corresponding to a location in the source. This doesn't really matter though, since you can just type in the source to make it automatically scroll.

Just like with LaTeX, you can click on a reference number to jump to the corresponding bibliography item. I kind of wish there were a keyboard shortcut to jump back (similar to ^- in VS Code), but again, I can achieve that by just typing in the source.

The "Hayagriva" YAML-based bibliography format seems fine. It's nice to have an actually-machine-readable data format. Plenty of people have their gripes with YAML, but personally I don't mind it.

The bad

The dictionary is case-sensitive which I think is generally good, but in this case that actually becomes bad because it's limited to 100 words. It's not even sorted, which seems absurd! There's a GitHub issue about this.

It is a bit annoying to debug parse errors in the bibliography YAML. For instance, one paper's title had a colon in it (a fairly common occurrence), and the error message said "Failed to parse YAML (mapping values are not allowed in this context at line 3 column 14)", which is the right location for the error in my actual refs.yml file; but the error message says it comes from main.typ, and after that message it says "(line 73)" which is just the line number for the #bibliography command at the end of my main.typ file. When I click on it, it brings me there instead of to the actual error location in the refs.yml file. And when I go to refs.yml, there are no red squigglies at all (even though it's just a generic YAML parsing error), so I have to look back at the line and column number from the error message to locate it and fix it (by wrapping in double quotes).

Overall, I like it! My current prediction is that it'll be a relatively smooth experience for this thesis proposal. This is a pretty short post since I want to get comfortable with posting more frequently. Maybe later I'll write a followup after I've used Typst more.