55.9k stars · Apache-2.0 · v0.15.1 (2026-07-17) · Track this in Scout
Modern typesetting: plain-text source compiles to a polished PDF in milliseconds, with excellent Cyrillic support.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons
What it is
A modern typesetting system: you write content in a simple markup language with real scripting, and it compiles to a polished PDF in milliseconds. It is the first credible replacement for LaTeX in decades.
What it is good for. Edition 2 pointed out that an email list is the only audience a publisher owns, and Edition 5 suggested a Slidev PDF as the thing people trade an address for. Slides make a thin lead magnet; a proper twenty-page guide — "how to get a straight answer out of a 400-message thread" — is what people actually hand over an email for, and it doubles as something to put on the Astro site for AI assistants to read. Typst is the way to produce one that does not look like a Word document: source is plain text, so Claude Code writes and revises it, a translated edition is the same source with different strings rather than a second layout job, and the whole thing rebuilds in under a second when the cover changes.
- Compiles in milliseconds with readable error messages — the two things LaTeX never gave anyone.
- Real scripting: generate a chart, a table of figures, or twelve variants of the same guide from data.
- Excellent Cyrillic and multilingual support, with proper hyphenation in several languages at once.
- It is still a markup language you have to learn a little of. Not Word, and not a design tool — layout beyond the templates means reading docs.
- The package ecosystem is young; a template that exists in LaTeX may not exist here, and you may end up building the look yourself.
- Pre-1.0 at v0.15.1. The language has broken between minor versions before. Pin the compiler version in your project.
