First-gen 50-year-old open source suffers from a first-mover problem of not knowing how people will use the thing. Thus, 50 years later, we end up with multiple-gigabyte distributions and messy, inconsistent syntactic approaches to hack together what people want and need.

Typst has 50 years of accumulated TeX experiences to learn from, and fit everything people actually want to use into a 45M binary, and maybe you'll download a few dozen K of package scripts.

I have used it for much more than academic publishing (book, brochure, and even card layout) and it's hands-down the best tool ever made for producing documents of any imaginable kind. Procedurally producing layouts from first-class JSON and CSV support is bliss.

Typst is open source, so you can run it on your computer; it's available as a CLI and has integrations with multiples IDEs (most use tinymist). Using typst is better than subscribing and not using it IMO because you can already start creating content and advocating for it, while telling the team about bugs or pain points

I have made direct donations and I now just support financially by paying for a subscription to the web app.

I find myself switching between cli and web app a little more; the web app seems nice to experiment, share experiments especially when you need to demonstrate an issue when getting support, and has good enough git(hub) integration.

I would like Typst to support bounties, because I would throw a bit more towards HTML support.

LaTex is not too bad but it's hard to cook properly. My personal pain point with LaTex is that it depends so much on environment where it runs.

If you're not going to use the web app, you may as well sponsor them through GitHub instead. Also, you get stickers that way.

Have they indicated that they are working on microtypography support?

The example in this link of character-level justification is incredibly nice (enough to get me to try Typst), but it's not clear at least from this link whether they're actively working on microtypography.