Exhibit A: Saying Hello

Here is a complete, valid LaTeX document that puts one word on one page.

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}

\begin{document}
Hello.
\end{document}

Nine lines. Five of them exist to inform a piece of software written in 1978 that it is no longer 1978. You are manually telling your typesetter that Unicode happened. You are importing a package to explain the concept of a margin.

Here is the same document in Typst.

Hello.

That’s it. That’s the file. The margins are already sane. The font already renders. It already knows what a letter is.

Exhibit B: Basic Arithmetic

Suppose you want to add two numbers together and print the result. I want you to really sit with how modest a request this is.

LaTeX:

\newcounter{total}
\setcounter{total}{40}
\addtocounter{total}{2}
The answer is \thetotal.

You have to allocate a counter. You then mutate it with a dedicated command, and read it back with a different command that is the word “the” glued onto the front of your variable name.

Typst:

#let total = 40 + 2
The answer is #total.

It’s a variable. Mind-boggling, I know.

Exhibit C: A Reusable Note Box

You want a little callout box. Bold label, indented, shaded background. A thing every word processor has had since Clippy was alive.

LaTeX:

\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{mdframed}

\newmdenv[
  backgroundcolor=gray!15,
  linewidth=0pt,
  innerleftmargin=8pt,
  innerrightmargin=8pt,
  innertopmargin=8pt,
  innerbottommargin=8pt,
]{notebox}

\newcommand{\note}[1]{%
  \begin{notebox}%
  \textbf{Note:} #1%
  \end{notebox}%
}

Look at those percent signs. Do you know what those are for? They’re there to comment out the newline. Because if you don’t manually suppress the whitespace, LaTeX inserts a space, and your box gets a mystery gap. The fix is an arbitrary punctuation mark at the end of a line. LaTeX forces you to remember stupid shit like this for everything.

Here’s a note box in Typst:

#let note(body) = block(
  fill: luma(240),
  inset: 8pt,
  radius: 4pt,
  width: 100%,
)[*Note:* #body]

It’s a function. It takes an argument. The argument has a name, not a number. Nothing is invisible. Nothing needs to be suppressed. It works the first time.

Exhibit D: A Loop

\usepackage{pgffor}
\foreach \i in {1,...,3}{Item \i\ }

Note the \i\ at the end. That trailing backslash-space is a literal escaped space, because otherwise LaTeX eats the whitespace after a control sequence. Forget it and your items fuse into Item 1Item 2Item 3.

LaTeX loop syntax is objectively terrible.

Meanwhile, here’s how you loop with Typst:

#for i in range(1, 4) [Item #i ]

There’s no stupid “gotcha” that you have to remember, and it reads a lot like Python, which is nice. Was that so hard?

Exhibit E: The Error Messages

This is my favorite part. Here is LaTeX telling you something is wrong:

Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 12--18

Badness. Ten thousand. That’s the actual word. Not “your line spacing looks stretched.” Badness. A number on a scale you were never told about, representing a quality you cannot see, in a box you didn’t know existed.

LaTeX errors can cascade into a miles long terminal output that takes several minutes to stop. I know, I’ve been there. And in the end it may be caused by something as stupid as forgetting a closing bracket.

Typst points at the line, tells you what it expected, and tells you what it got. In English. Like software that respects you.

Your Objections Are Stupid

“The ecosystem isn’t as mature.” Correct. But, a landfill can be mature too.

LaTeX has had 50 years to accumulate 6,000 packages, roughly nine of which are maintained, and the one you need conflicts with the one your university template requires.

“My journal requires LaTeX submission.” Then submit LaTeX. Nobody is asking you to fall on your sword for this.

“You just don’t understand TeX’s box model.” I understand it fine. I also understand that I shouldn’t have to. The entire pitch of a typesetting system is that it handles the typesetting. If mastering the internals is a prerequisite for producing a two-page PDF, the abstraction has failed and you have Stockholm syndrome about it.

“I’m not learning a new typesetting engine!” You learned LaTeX even though it hurt. You’ll be up and running with Typst in a fraction of the time, and unlike LaTeX, it won’t kick you in the balls.

The Verdict

Knuth built TeX because typesetting in 1978 was genuinely terrible and he was genuinely a genius. That’s not in dispute. He solved his problem so thoroughly that we’ve spent five decades refusing to notice it was his problem, in his decade, with his constraints.

You are allowed to stop. The 4GB distribution is not a personality. Download a single binary, open Helix, and write something.

Typst Is Better Than LaTeX