Context: LaTeX is a typesetting system. When compiling a document, a lot of really in-depth debugging information is printed, which can be borderline incomprehensible to anyone but LaTeX experts. It can also be a visual hindrance when looking for important information like errors.
TIL my thesis could have been easier if Typst would have been available years earlier.
yeah, I still wrote my dissertation last year on latex because that was the template they had and I didn’t feel like reading all formatting rules and writing a Typst version for that. That said, creating a Typst template is a far more straightforward than any other format.
honestly LaTeX isn’t too bad once you have it all set up. An environment with the correct packages, a collection of templates for common document types, a set of macros for often-used constructions, and and editor with good snippets and syntax highlighting. Once you have all of that, LaTeX becomes a breeze. At one point, I was even taking notes with LaTeX in real-time during lectures.
But that’s the beauty of typst – it’s like a fully beefed out LaTeX setup, but straight out of the box. No need for snippets, because the syntax is lean enough as it is. No need for templates, because there is no boilerplate needed for a document. No need to waste half an hour setting up an environment and looking for dependencies – all of typst is just two executables (compiler and LSP), and package management is automatic.
