For a long time, I felt like Microsoft’s Office suite it had no opposition in the world of productivity apps. If your experience is anything like mine, you grew up seeing Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on every school and library computer, and the idea of using anything else was absurd.
But things have changed. Many people aren’t willing to pay for something like Microsoft Office (or Microsoft 365, as it’s known today) and, truth be told, there are plenty of great tools out there that do the same job for free. Typst is one of those tools that I discovered very recently and, after using it for a while, I already love it.
What is Typst?
A different way of writing
I still tend to imagine Writing Tools as something more aligned with Microsoft Word, with a menu offering all the formatting options you could want. But Typst is a little different and is kind of an alternative to Latexwhich is a typesetting system that I was also not familiar with before. The way it works is that if you want to format text, you can use simple formatting indicators right in the writing area and it allows you to do a lot more than you think.
For my use case it’s pretty simple as all I really need is to format the headers and basic text most of the time. Simply add a = symbol at the beginning of a given line, and becomes a header, with subsequent = symbols that make it a lower level header so I can be more specific with my formatting. To make text bold, I can put it between asterisks or put it in italics with underscores on either side. It is something similar to sale style of format.
Typst also has a minimal user interface, making it easier to focus on the writing task at hand. Half of the screen shows your writing view and the other half shows a preview of the final document, although you can customize it to fit your needs.
He is more capable than I thought.
Images, bibliography and more.
While the basics of Typst are easy to understand, the feature set goes beyond what I really expected for something like this, and there’s a lot you can do with the type of content you use. It may use simple headers, but Typst actually allows you to define all kinds of behaviors, always using plain text to do so.
Say, for example, you want all titles to use a specific font, but also include numbering and even subnumbering styles. You can use the set function to define a heading style at the beginning of the document. For example, #set header(numbering: “1.1.a)”) makes the first two levels of headings numbered, while a third level uses letters for separation.
But there’s even more to the format that Typst lets you do. You can insert images into a document by uploading them to your project and then inserting them into the document using the #image feature, which also gives me options to choose the size of the image and where to align it. You can also create inline images by adding them to a box, which is useful if I want to add a visual indicator or something to my text.
Another thing I find interesting is how it can even support things like a proper bibliography. You can load bibliography files into your project and then quickly reference them by typing @{reference}that automatically collects sources from your bibliography file. When you reference something in the text, it is automatically added to the bottom of the page of the final document, properly formatted and everything you need to make it look professional. Everything is very well thought out.
There is a learning curve
Simplicity comes at a cost.
While I really appreciate everything Typst can do, it took me a bit to get started. The simplified menu gives you access to some basic formatting tools, like bold, italics, creating headings and lists, but there are so many tools available here that you need to spend some time in the tutorial to really understand everything, and it’s hard to know what’s possible and what’s not.
When I first tried images, I wondered if it was possible to align them to the side of a paragraph, but as far as I know, it isn’t. You can have images inline or in their own block, but you can’t easily split the document into a single paragraph. But it took me some time to look into it, and the way functions can be combined to achieve certain behaviors makes it a little tricky to remember all the details.
That said, Typst tries to help you use its features with autocomplete functionality. When you type a function sign, the software automatically suggests functions and can then also suggest arguments for those functions. For example, the image function will automatically display the file names of images you have loaded into the project, and the alignment function will automatically display the various alignment options, which are specific to that function, so it makes it a little easier to find your way around.
Is it better than Microsoft Word?
It depends on what you need
As capable as Typst is, it would be false to claim that it can completely replace Microsoft Word for everyone. There are many strange, unusual, or just plain specific formatting tools in Word that you can’t replicate with this feature set. But I (and I suspect many others) don’t need all the advanced editing tools for our work, and Typst can already cover a lot of use cases. Titles, lists, tables, images, bibliography and even page layouts such as double columns are possible here, and it is sufficient for the type of work I do.
The only downside is that there are some limitations, but again, for my needs, I don’t expect to need anything that requires the paid subscription. I recommend checking it out if you’re looking for a new way to write your documents.
