I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst

Summary

I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst I recently submitted my PhD thesis, and while waiting for the physical copies to get printed I thought I'd write about something you (hopefully) wouldn't notice when reading it. I wrote it in Typst, not LaTeX. In this post I will talk a bit about what went well and what didn't. Typst (https://typst.app/) is a modern take on a typesetting language that I think has a real shot at dethroning LaTeX. I would describe the language as a mix of markdown and dynamically typed Rust, which may sound weird but is a really nice fit. Day-to-day document writing being markdown-like is very comfortable (certainly much nicer than littering your writing with \). The scripting language is powerful, well thought out, and makes it very easy to jump between code and typesetting. For example Produces This is bold text. The sum of [1, 2, 5, 8] is 16 In the rest of this post, I will talk about some of the things I liked and disliked about Typst while writing the thesis. The good Compile times The thing that pushed me over the edge to try Typst for my thesis was a friend telling me his LaTeX thesis took 90 seconds to compile towards the end. I am far too easily distracted to tolerate 90 second compile times when I'm making small changes. The Typst compiler is fast, on small-medium sized documents it compiles fast enough to do live writing in the PDF preview. As my thesis grew beyond 150 pages, compile times dropped a bit. Clean builds take about 15 seconds, but it also does incremental compilation so for content changes, it is still nearly instant, for local layout changes it takes a second or two. Even for large global template changes, 10 seconds is a whole lot better than 90 seconds, and I am confident that being able to iterate on layout and style 9 times faster produced a nicer looking result in the end. The language The Typst language is amazingly well thought out. Markdown syntax is nicer than Tex syntax for general writing, but what really shines is the...