If you've done any work in statistics, maths, computer science, or a lot of other technical subjects, you've quite likely come across LaTeX.

LaTeX is a markup language, which is used a lot in scientific publishing. It's been around for quite a long time, and it's always been a bit of a headache to use.

If you're as old as me, you might even remember using text editors, writing up your markup in text, having to then run it through a compiler, and keeping your fingers crossed that it worked.

Overleaf made LaTeX more accessible and opened it up to a wider audience.

We had these menus here, so we didn't need to remember all of the different markup components.

It was still some amount of work and there was still a degree of inflexibility when it came to actually getting it to present how you wanted, but it did make life somewhat easier.

Two years ago, Typst was first released to the public after a bit of beta testing prior to that, and it is the next step forward in scientific publishing using a markup language.

It has a few things going for it ahead of LaTeX.

So, it is simpler and more intuitive. There's still a learning curve, but it's certainly not as bad as LaTeX.

It has scripting, so where you've got some iteration, you can actually write scripts for that. It compiles faster and it has a wider range of templates and flexibility for you to be able to produce different looking documents.

So Typst, typst.app, and we'll have a scroll down the page. I'll then show you some examples of some Typst documents, and then I'll show you how to do it in RStudio.

So, Typst integrates with Quarto, and you can use Quarto to produce Typst documents.

Heading down the screen here, we can see an explanation of how it works, and it's got a couple of different examples, and then in more detail, examples of the kind of content you can be putting into your document.

It is particularly useful when you're dealing with a lot of maths and having to present algebra.

Further down the page, we have this animation here of a Typst document. We can see the editing happening, and in fact, they are demonstrating the cloud editing.

We can see a couple of different people editing at once and how it is changing the document.

Here's a summary of how it compares to your other main languages that you might be using.

So comparing to Word and Google, it's going to help you with the automatic formatting and with the level of professionalism that documents come out just by default.

That was always one of the selling points of LaTeX. In addition to be able to put in all of the maths and the complex technical content, the way that it produced documents, there was far less fiddling to have something that had a very consistent professional look.

The downside of LaTeX, though, was that learning curve, was that level of complexity. So they have got this automated scripting which is really handy where you need to have any kind of repetition.

And with what I've tested so far, I found it to just be a little bit more intuitive, a little bit easier to work with.

Compared to Markdown, it's really just a more powerful version.

It is giving you more options, more things that you can do. And I really like this.

I've only briefly tested it. So depending on the complexity of your documents, I don't know if it's always going to work, but it is letting you convert Word, LaTeX, Markdown, even OpenDocument Text into Typst projects in the dashboard.

So, so far so good. I haven't tested it with anything particularly complex, but that's really nice.

It's one of the challenges is sometimes you might want to go to a new system, but you've got that back catalog of documents and you don't want to be running them in parallel and this lets you convert over.

The base version of Typst is free and it lets you do pretty much everything that a solo user would want to do. There is then these paid versions.

So there is this one here where you've got integrations with things like Jira and GitHub.

So that's where you're starting to get more into that professional publisher rather than just solo researcher or grad student or that type of user.

For people where those integrations are going to be useful, I think that's going to be well worth the extra $10 or $15 a month, I think it is.

And then there's also an organization level where you can be running it locally on your own data centers and you get priority support as well.

Before we look at a live Typst project, this was in this month's Linux magazine. And so I thought I would just share.

They've got a number of different examples of comparisons of LaTeX to Typst. And this one here producing the integration formula.

And we can see that it is simpler, not necessarily simple. There's still a certain amount of work in terms of getting the order and the scripting, but to me, I found it much more intuitive.

We don't need to mess around with the slashes and the brackets to anywhere near the same extent with the LaTeX as we do with the Typst.

And hopefully when you look at that, you can read that more easily than this one. And one of the main ideas for these types of languages was that it would be so cumbersome in something like a Word equation editor to be pointing and clicking to be able to generate all of this where ideally we would be able to have it set into our document and we could just continue typing.

Coming over to the Typst app, I've logged in. I've created a project and I've just put in some fairly simple details here to produce this.

This was just a template I found online and I've shared this one because it shows a couple of different things.

One is the relatively simple and again, relative to doing it in LaTeX, simple way that we can get our formula there in the center.

And then the second nice thing is the scripting.

So we've got the scripting here to be able to produce the Fibonacci numbers. So anytime where we might have some sort of sequence of numbers that we can just write as a script, this is going to be really handy for you to be able to use to do that.

The interface is nice and clean. We can see that up the top we do have our main formatting bits and pieces.

It's reminiscent of Overleaf, but again just a little bit simpler. We can use the share button on the top right to be able to share this.

And then we can also download as PDF, PNG and SVG. The file type itself for Typst files is just TYP.

If you are an R user, this is now built into Quarto. So you can use Quarto just as you normally would.

And really the only thing you actually have to change is just here format putting in Typst. There's lots of other stuff you can do to be able to access Typst formats.

There's templates that you can get. If we scroll down a little, you can see examples of some of the style templates, whether it is for journal articles.

We can see we've got the IEEE there with the two column format.

We've got academic posters, letters. We've got that newsletter style.

There's in fact lots and lots of different templates out there that people have built. But it can be as simple as just adding that.

Here on the Typst help, you can see that we have some really nice guidance. It talks you through the different settings and so page sizes, margins, number of columns, all in that Typst style.

So if you've been using Typst, it's going to be pretty familiar.

But now you have some extra flexibility in terms of what you can get that final document to look like.

And we can keep going down. There's lots and lots of info there. And particularly once you start getting into the stuff with the blocks and the CSS, you'll see that's where it starts to get really powerful.

You can get R Studio to keep your TYP file or you can just get it to compile into a PDF or whatever you would normally do with Quarto.

If we jump over to R Studio, here's my example and we can see that I've added format Typst.

I'm keeping my TYP file. Uh I decided that I would tell it specifically my font size and my font. And then we come down and we can see there's plenty here.

That's just as usual. When we render it though, you can see over on the right hand side, it's got that Typst/LaTeX feel to it.

Now, you've always been able to use LaTeX in the background of your Quarto and your markdown, but now you've got access to Typst as well.

And it's just going to be that little bit easier, particularly if you are starting to add some of that complex math.

came across this page on GitHub which has got a whole lot of different templates.

So, we can see here all sorts. There's actually lots and lots and lots of them. There's a whole lot of domains.

We can see there's specific templates for conferences, journals, grants, proposals, plotting, scripting, slides, all sorts of stuff already done by people.

You can go to any of these sites, get the TYP, you can get the code, you can get samples.

So, for example, from those maths ones, undergrad math, this was actually a port, so there was a LaTeX version.

And it's kind of like a cheat sheet. So, we can see here it's got all of the common things you might be doing for any of your maths markup.

And then if we take that and we've got the code as well, we can see how the code translates into all of these different bits and pieces.

typst.app to get here to the homepage. You just sign up and you'll be able to get into the free version immediately.

Start experimenting. Similarly, if you're working in Quarto, then just if you're up to date with your installation of Quarto, no real changes that you need to make.

There is a TYPR package which may be of use for those of you that are used to doing things a little bit more manually, but outside of that, there's not really all that much extra that you need to learn beyond the syntax for Typst for doing these particular things that you want.

If you already know LaTeX, I think it should be a fairly quick transition for you.

If you don't know either of them, then this is going to be the much easier one to learn.

If you're in higher education and you have been getting your students to learn LaTeX and use it for assignments and things like that, I'd really encourage you to have a look at Typst.

You're going to be able to get the same quality of output, but it is going to be substantially less time for your students to have to try and grapple with LaTeX.

Thanks for watching. If you like this, then you may like this other video here that I did recently.

It's on Argent AI. That's an AI that you can install into RStudio.

It's going to help you with a whole lot of your coding. You can set up agents, automate workflows, and make life much easier.

What is Typst? The Modern LaTeX Alternative

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