Typst

Three years ago I wrote about a workflow to generate PDF files out of my Markdown content, both on this website and on De Programmatica Ipsum. That first setup involved Pandoc and TeX, and it was a solution that worked well, but was unfortunately slow as hell, particularly given the amount of articles I have in both sites. A faster solution was badly needed. Looking for options I discovered that Pandoc supports Typst since version 3.1.2, released in March 2023… but then I asked myself, what is Typst? Well it turns out it’s a new markup language coupled with a processor toolchain written in Rust; not just another one of those great “rewritings in Rust” but a new product, aiming at the same market than LaTeX but with all the speed of a Rust-built binary. Typst provides all of the features I need, including syntax highlighting, math equation support, links as footnotes, and much more. So I gave it a shot, and with the help of Cursor I adapted the old LaTeX template used to generate PDF…