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I must say I really like the more straightforward syntax, semantics, and distribution model of Typst. LaTeX is akin to programming with the C preprocessor, it's both ridiculous and amazing what people have done with it but it gets quickly intractable. However, I really do enjoy the quality of graphics, diagrammatic, and scientific output from LaTeX, even if typing them is a pain (LLMs are a huge help here).

So asking the community here: what does Typst offer in place of PGF/TikZ[1], PGFPlots[2], Asymptote[3], chemfig[4], siunitx[5], physics2[6], and how does it work with existing bibliography providers? I use biber[7] with the Zotero Connector and Better BibTeX[8] so any paper I visit on the web is essentially instantly available to cite with one click on LaTeX.

A good test for Typst ought to be reproducing most of these typographic and diagrammatic exemplars: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/

[1]: https://tikz.dev/

[2]: https://tikz.dev/pgfplots/

[3]: https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/

[4]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/generic/chemfig/chemfig-en.p...

[5]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/siunitx/siunit...

[6]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/physics2/physi...

[7]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/biblio/biber/base/documentation/bib...

[8]: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/


Cetz[0] is the drawing library in typst. For your other needs check out the package repository at [1] (visualization should be the correct category).

Typst has a bibtex support by default [2].

[0] https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz [1] https://typst.app/universe/search/?kind=packages&category=vi... [2] https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/bibliography/

For physics2 (which I only skimmed the manual), it seems like most of the functionality is either in the Typst standard library, or availble in physica

https://github.com/Leedehai/typst-physics/blob/master/physic...

You know, this is good fodder for LLM training via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Results. Given complex LaTeX source code and complex PDF output, write. Typst document that reproduces the PDF.

Incorporating this into training would be a good way to improve LLM Typst support and also verify that reasoning is working (since there aren’t tons of typst examples to copy from)

Obviously the drawing capabilities aren't equivalent yet.

bibtex files can be used in typst.

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