typst VS pandoc

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)?

I'm not sure what you're referring to because when justification is enabled Typst uses almost the same line breaking algorithm as TeX. [1]

One problem we had was over-eager hyphenation. We've addressed that recently. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/blob/9b001e21121ab7b5645aa36f...

Send your publisher a .docx file made by converting a .md using Pandoc:

https://pandoc.org/

I used to work in publishing --- Word docs were hacked at by editors since it was their standard tool, then they would get flowed into PageMaker, or Quark XPress, or Ventura Publisher, or Adobe InDesign --- except of course for the LaTeX docs.

For .docx, the converted file is fine, so long as it has all the text and bold/italics which the author wants.

pandoc

I think yours is the candidate for Pandoc[1] or something like Soupault[2]. But you will be doing the HTML/CSS writing yourself.

1. https://pandoc.org

2. https://soupault.app

pandoc has a feature called filters. These filters are small programs that can manipulate the AST of the document. They can be written in any language, but the most common language is Lua as its interpreter is embedded in pandoc, and it is faster compared to the JSON filter interface which is also used by other languages (You may wish to listen to the Episode 37 of The Haskell Interlude podcast, where Joachim Breitner and David Christiansen interview John MacFarlane, the creator of pandoc, where he mentions Lua vs JSON filters).

PDF and Epub support a featureset that far exceeds Markdown in it's basic specification. Translating from one to the other would be pretty lossy, but possible.

You could probably use Pandoc to do this yourself, but again I'd stress that this is a pretty poor way to translate the original document: https://pandoc.org/