alt Hacker NewsI'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with.
I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mostly via LLMs). From there, I generate both a nice digital PDF and a print-ready PDF using Typst, and then use Pandoc again to convert the Typst into what ultimately becomes an EPUB.
It all works quite beautifully. Most of the challenges I've run into are related to Typst features that don't map cleanly to Pandoc, so I end up adding a few funky conditionals so those features aren't hit when converting via Pandoc. sys.inputs makes that very easy https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/11588
The books in question: https://thelabofthought.co/shop
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Using skills can help a lot. They can guide agents to not use LaTeX syntax (a common problem) and provide access to the full documentation.
Frontier LLMs work great with Typst. (Have published multiple books using it).
I’ve been using Typst pretty heavily for the past few months after a few years of LaTeX, and I’ve had a similar experience. I do really love Typst though. It feels nimble, pleasant to work with and like a huge improvement over LaTeX in a lot of ways.
That said, LLMs have been noticeably better with LaTeX than with Typst for me. Typst works fine for the basics: loops, functions, small layout tweaks and that kind of thing. The problems mostly show up with more niche features.
What helped me was pointing the LLM to the current Typst docs, either the website or as they mention in their blog about the new update they also have a PDF export of the docs now (https://github.com/typst/typst/releases/download/v0.15.0/typ...). The docs are very good, and I suspect older training data plus Typst’s breaking changes are part of the problem.
One downside is that because I started using Typst with LLMs right away, I got a big head start but never became fully fluent in the language. I still find myself going back to the docs, the internet or an LLM more often than I’d like.
"LLMs struggle with Typst a bit"
My experience is the opposite. Especially when instructing the LLM to do very fine grained and detailed adjustments. Works like a charm.
Typst is my go-to format if I need more than plain text.