honood/typst

A new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn.

Typst is a new markup-based typsetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use. Typst has:

• Built-in markup for the most common formatting tasks
• Flexible functions for everything else
• A tightly integrated scripting system
• Math typesetting, bibliography management, and more
• Fast compile times thanks to incremental compilation
• Friendly error messages in case something goes wrong

This repository contains the Typst compiler and its CLI, which is everything you need to compile Typst documents locally. For the best writing experience, consider signing up to our collaborative online editor for free. It is currently in public beta.

Example

A gentle introduction to Typst is available in our documentation. However, if you want to see the power of Typst encapsulated in one image, here it is:

Let's dissect what's going on:

• We use set rules to configure element properties like the size of pages or the numbering of headings. By setting the page height to auto, it scales to fit the content. Set rules accommodate the most common configurations. If you need full control, you can also use show rules to completely redefine the appearance of an element.

• We insert a heading with the = Heading syntax. One equals sign creates a top level heading, two create a subheading and so on. Typst has more lightweight markup like this, see the syntax reference for a full list.

• Mathematical equations are enclosed in dollar signs. By adding extra spaces around the contents of a equation, we can put it into a separate block. Multi-letter identifiers are interpreted as Typst definitions and functions unless put into quotes. This way, we don't need backslashes for things like floor and sqrt. And phi.alt applies the alt modifier to the phi to select a particular symbol variant.

• Now, we get to some scripting. To input code into a Typst document, we can write a hashtag followed by an expression. We define two variables and a recursive function to compute the n-th fibonacci number. Then, we display the results in a center-aligned table. The table function takes its cells row-by-row. Therefore, we first pass the formulas $F_1$ to $F_10$ and then the computed fibonacci numbers. We apply the spreading operator (..) to both because they are arrays and we want to pass the arrays' items as individual arguments.

Text version of the code example.

#set page(width: 10cm, height: auto)
#set heading(numbering: "1.")

= Fibonacci sequence
The Fibonacci sequence is defined through the
_recurrence relation_ $F_n = F_(n-1) + F_(n-2)$.
It can also be expressed in closed form:

$ F_n = floor(1 / sqrt(5) phi.alt^n), quad
  phi.alt = (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2 $

#let count = 10
#let nums = range(1, count + 1)
#let fib(n) = (
  if n <= 2 { 1 }
  else { fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) }
)

The first #count numbers of the sequence are:

#align(center, table(
  columns: count,
  ..nums.map(n => $F_#n$),
  ..nums.map(n => str(fib(n))),
))

Install and use

You can get sources and pre-built binaries for the latest release of Typst from the releases page. This will give you Typst's CLI which converts Typst sources into PDFs.

# Creates `file.pdf` in working directory.
typst file.typ

# Creates PDF file at the desired path.
typst path/to/source.typ path/to/output.pdf

You can also watch source files and automatically recompile on changes. This is faster than compiling from scratch each time because Typst has incremental compilation.

# Watches source files and recompiles on changes.
typst --watch file.typ

If you prefer an integrated IDE-like experience with autocompletion and instant preview, you can also check out the Typst web app, which is currently in public beta.

Build from source

To build Typst yourself, you need to have the latest stable Rust installed. Then, you can build the CLI with the following command:

cargo build -p typst-cli --release

The optimized binary will be stored in target/release/.

Contributing

We would love to see contributions from the community. If you experience bugs, feel free to open an issue or send a PR with a fix. For new features, we would invite you to open an issue first so we can explore the design space together. If you want to contribute and are wondering how everything works, also check out the ARCHITECTURE.md file. It explains how the compiler works.

Design Principles

All of Typst has been designed with three key goals in mind: Power, simplicity, and performance. We think it's time for a system that matches the power of LaTeX, is easy to learn and use, all while being fast enough to realize instant preview. To achieve these goals, we follow three core design principles:

• Simplicity through Consistency: If you know how to do one thing in Typst, you should be able to transfer that knowledge to other things. If there are multiple ways to do the same thing, one of them should be at a different level of abstraction than the other. E.g. it's okay that = Introduction and #heading[Introduction] do the same thing because the former is just syntax sugar for the latter.

• Power through Composability: There are two ways to make something flexible: Have a knob for everything or have a few knobs that you can combine in many ways. Typst is designed with the second way in mind. We provide systems that you can compose in ways we've never even thought of. TeX is also in the second category, but it's a bit low-level and therefore people use LaTeX instead. But there, we don't really have that much composability. Instead, there's a package for everything (\usepackage{knob}).

• Performance through Incrementality: All Typst language features must accommodate for incremental compilation. Luckily we have comemo, a system for incremental compilation which does most of the hard work in the background.