typst VS WeasyPrint

I may be a tad late, but typst does have a compiler you can use locally with your favorite local text editor.

https://github.com/typst/typst/releases

I am happily experimenting with Typst right now (https://typst.app/ ), which compiles much faster than LaTeX and with a syntax very similar to md, together with nice support for math, figures and advanced settings.

Check out [typest](https://typst.app/) if you're looking to write a book yourself.

[Hypermedia Systems book](https://hypermedia.systems/) was written with it.

This [issue](https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4224) and others like it are dealbreakers for me. There are numerous related issues, but the developers are stubbornly sticking to their interpretation—using the older definition of leading from the days of metal type, rather than the more modern concept of line-spacing. No other software or modern typesetting system I know of uses this approach anymore. This is particularly frustrating since I work with a lot of multilingual text, including Arabic, and it's very difficult to align the baselines when setting text in more than one column.

- Long-form, print-friendly report generation, including data visualization, tables and images

[0] https://github.com/typst/typst

I somehow didn't know about https://github.com/typst/typst. This is a really cool project, going to dig in further.

At first glance, this seems particularly useful for scientific-style notebooks, which aren't our primary focus. If the demand is there though, I don't see why we couldn't integrate.

It's kinda early, but we're looking at collaborating with https://typst.app/ (a modern LaTeX alternative) on this. They already have some of the low-level PDF writing infrastructure in place, and are working on something higher-level that we're hoping to use.

(you could also look at using Typst directly if you're not tied to HTML)

I think that I need something in between. Recently, I was checking typst. It is quite impressive. But I am not sure if I need a better LaTeX.

I think the previous author is confused because if you google "Typst", you end up at https://typst.app, which seems to only advertise the web GUI and not the open-source CLI tool.

> Now, it’s certainly possible that one could develop a new, generative typesetting language that captures the virtues that I’ve discussed above and is free of TeX’s historical baggage.

Like [typst](https://github.com/typst/typst)?

To create our PDF reports, we use a combination of Weasyprint, Jinja, and Plotly charts. To render a report as a PDF, we first have to render all graphs as images.

https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint

> From a technical point of view, WeasyPrint is a visual rendering engine for HTML and CSS that can export to PDF. It aims to support web standards for printing. WeasyPrint is free software made available under a BSD license.

Hmm, I wonder if you could use servo for a similar purpose.

Also see a full web rendering engine (modern HTML+CSS the whole layout engine) made in pure Python, that can export to PDFs: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint

Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

https://weasyprint.org

I've gone through a number of systems to convert CV's, business cards, and other docs and it hasn't let me down yet.

You don't _have_ to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering.

The only open source alternative I know of is WeasyPrint at https://weasyprint.org/. I'm not sure how well it fares against PrinceXML, though.

And thanks for the pointer to Taffy - I didn't know it before!

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts.

[1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

Performance is not the strength of WeasyPrint, meaning that heavy HTML files will increase generation time. You should always compress images before attaching them, as they are not compressed by default. Generating a 50-page-long PDF may take up to a minute in extreme cases, although multi-page documents generated on my project take fewer than 2 seconds to generate.

For Python there is Weasyprint: you prepare the invoice as an HTML document, and Weasyprint turns it into a PDF

https://weasyprint.org/