Some someone who learned document editing and drafting through LaTeX in my undergrad, I gotta say I'm not sure I'd recommend it anymore to people looking for a new tool.
To me, Typst is the 'weirdly missing' option here. I really see it as the most promising successor to LaTeX, which is not something I say lightly given that I spent years scoffing at the idea of Typst ever displacing LaTeX in my life.
I watched Typst from afar for many years. I finally took it out for a spin about a month ago after version 0.14 dropped.
In less than an hour I reproduced my résumé—complete with fancy functions to typeset employment entries on a grid system. In under 24 hours I was tinkering with the Typst source code.
Typst is amazing. Syntax is clean and consistent. The compiler is so so fast. Docs are excellent. And it is very close to TeX when it comes to typesetting quality. There are a few tiny rough edges that any \usepackage{microtype} enjoyer will miss, but stuff is improving rapidly.
(Also, XKCD disclaimer: this was not an LLM—I just use em-dashes a lot because TeX made them easy to type and I got used to having them.)
Typst seems to be a cloud based solution with monthly fees? How’s that even relevant to the discussion of open source, free, local tools like latex/markdown?
Absolutely not, no. At least not any more than LaTeX is a cloud based solution with monthly fees (Overleaf)
The language, ecosystem, and compiler are FOSS. There is a cloud editor / collaboration platform that is paid, but nothing about the language requires that you use it (I use it almost exclusively through emacs)
No, Typst the typesetting software is FOSS (Apache license), as is a bunch of the surrounding ecosystem (e.g. the LSP for editor support). The people making it also ofter paid SASS stuff for features enterprises like, but there is no need to use them.
To me, Typst is the 'weirdly missing' option here. I really see it as the most promising successor to LaTeX, which is not something I say lightly given that I spent years scoffing at the idea of Typst ever displacing LaTeX in my life.