This tool is featured as part of the Single-Source Publishing community’s monthly meeting.
What is it?
Typst is a markup-based technical writing platform.
Tool ID card
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Main purpose: Write and automate documents with professional typesetting and rich content for distribution in PDF, HTML, and images.
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Who is it for? Typst is for both authors and publishers:
Authors can create camera-ready manuscripts in Typst using either publisher-supplied templates, community templates from Typst Universe, or their own.
Publishers can typeset articles, including from single-source publishing input formats such as JATS, Markdown, or from Typst sources. Throughout this process, they can assert fine-grained control over the document’s appearance across both paged (PDF, SVG, images) and web (HTML) export.
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Skill level: Typst is designed to have a low skill floor. Its markup is easy to learn, particularly to prior users of Markdown or LaTeX. To use the scripting and templating components of Typst, programming skills are helpful.
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Access: https://typst.app/
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Key features:
- Rich typesetting capabilities
- Templates separate formatting from content
- Accessible documents out of the box
- Instant preview of changes
- Familiar markup-based syntax
- Friendly error messages
- Extendable with custom packages and integrated scripting
- Open-source compiler
Additionally, the closed-source Typst web app provides a online environment to collaborate on Typst documents without first installing any software.
What can I do with it?
Typst be used to create one-off documents like reports and teaching deliverables or serve as the backbone of a single source publishing workflow: You can create a single Typst template to ingest your repository of manuscripts and convert them to reader-facing PDFs and web pages. Typst can read XML files, Markdown, and more either natively or using packages from Typst Universe, without involving external tools and transform them to unified, publishing-grade files without human input.
Good to know
Typst’s HTML export is currently behind a feature flag and does not yet export all styling applied to elements. Mathematical equations currently require manual entry of alternative descriptions to become accessible in PDFs.
Try it if you…
- use LaTeX to author your documents and are dissatisfied with its performance, extensibility, or user friendliness
- use a word processor to author your documents and want to automate formatting, or include richer plots and graphics in your documents
- are a publisher who currently uses custom and brittle scripts to generate LaTeX files for your final publication-grade files
- are a publisher who uses Pandoc in their publication flow but are hitting its limits
- are a publisher who relies on human labor, perhaps off-shored, to convert manuscripts into camera-ready files