Typst, the new writing tool, was open sourced a couple of days ago. This is right up my alley of course, and I have a couple of thoughts on it, which I share here. What is it? Typst is a writing tool that’s described as a LaTeX alternative: it takes plain-text markup as input and can produce nice looking PDFs from that.

Typst, the new writing tool, was open sourced a couple of days ago. This is right up my alley of course, and I have a couple of thoughts on it, which I share here. What is it? Typst is a writing tool that’s described as a LaTeX alternative: it takes plain-text markup as input and can produce nice looking PDFs from that.

Setting the document font this way works for ConTeXt, LaTeX, and HTML output. The fonts used in docx or odt output must be controlled with the reference document instead. The default LaTeX engine is pdflatex, which only supports TeX’s own font format and cannot use the TrueType or OpenType fonts installed on the system. However, XeLaTeX was written with that in mind; switching to that engine allows to specify any font available on the system.

Setting the document font this way works for ConTeXt, LaTeX, and HTML output. The fonts used in docx or odt output must be controlled with the reference document instead. The default LaTeX engine is pdflatex, which only supports TeX’s own font format and cannot use the TrueType or OpenType fonts installed on the system. However, XeLaTeX was written with that in mind; switching to that engine allows to specify any font available on the system.

A question came up on the Lua mailing list, asking whether there was a PDF version of the Lua manual. This is, of course, the home domain of pandoc, and I got nerd-sniped into producing a PDF (and ePUB) version of the manual. This is a good opportunity to showcase some pandoc features. The post describes the process of going from an HTML web page to a PDF file via LaTeX and pandoc. We will see how to quickly convert documents with pandoc;

A question came up on the Lua mailing list, asking whether there was a PDF version of the Lua manual. This is, of course, the home domain of pandoc, and I got nerd-sniped into producing a PDF (and ePUB) version of the manual. This is a good opportunity to showcase some pandoc features. The post describes the process of going from an HTML web page to a PDF file via LaTeX and pandoc. We will see how to quickly convert documents with pandoc;