When we think of documents, or documentation, they tend to fall into two circles. First are business documents, typically composed with an office application like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Second is project documentation, often created semi-automatically from a project using an app like Sphinx or Pandoc.
But there’s a third circle, one that can overlap the other two. These are documents produced by a typesetting language—a combination of markup and programming language used to produce books, textbooks, academic journals, scientific papers, technical manuals, and other documents where the formatting and layout is crucial.
A typesetting language allows you to create a handy, human-readable document that serves both as a single source of truth and as a foundation for outputting to print, web, e-book, and other formats. Over the last few years, an open-source project has shaped up to be a powerful choice for meeting all of those needs: Typst (pronounced “typist”).
TeX, LaTex, and now Typst
For decades, the preeminent typesetting language was TeX, better known in its more recent incarnation LaTeX. TeX was originally created by Donald Knuth in 1978, and LaTex followed in 1984.
