Two years and counting: How we are building the future of technical writing

You may have gotten to this post because you noticed that something new happened: We finally shipped our new landing page, picking up insights from our journey with Typst so far. In this post, I want to take you along and reflect on how Typst has progressed since we first hit the scene.

The Typst compiler has gained hundreds of features, big and small. Would you believe that just two years ago, Typst did not even support footnotes? Ever since, we have raced ahead to make Typst a great choice for technical documents, both in the industry and in academia. Among many other things, you can now...

• ...meticulously customize tables to represent even the most complex datasets.
• ...use Typst's powerful scripting capabilites to auto-generate your document from data sources like JSON and XML files.
• ...reason about the content and layout of your document with context.
• ...use packages and templates from the community or build and share your own.

As a company, we have grown financially sustainable over the past two years. Our team has grown to five members across three countries. We have introduced three new offerings: Typst Pro is our subscription to get the most out of the Typst web app. With Typst On-Premises, enterprise and security-conscious organizations can self-host the web app. Finally, Typst Open Source support lets teams building on the Typst compiler access the expertise of our team. Our dream was always for our company, Typst GmbH, to serve as a backbone for progress in our open-source software, a goal we have now achieved.

Our community has exploded in size and awesomeness: At the time of writing, Typst has over 44K stars on GitHub, putting it in the same ballpark as the new and trending programming language Zig (40K stars) and Prisma, a popular tool for working with databases in JavaScript (43K stars).

We are aware that creating a community is not only about making a number go up: We have launched the Typst Forum as a place for Typst users to help each other out and show their projects to the world. In the Questions category alone, the Forum has accumulated over 1,600 threads with answers for common and not-so-common challenges new and returning users face. Not only do these threads get the questions of their original posters answered, they also help everyone else: They can easily be found through search engines by others facing the same problem, creating a great knowledge base!

For us, a big milestone was the launch of Typst Universe, where Typst users can share packages and templates. With Typst Universe, every user can benefit from the work of some of our most advanced community members. Since the inception of Typst Universe, over 400 packages and about 390 templates were published. They range from custom elements like glossaries and algorithms, over checklist and project management templates, right down to packages for drawing all kinds of diagrams.

And finally, there is the Typst Discord, which was the original gathering place of our community and still fulfills a vital role in open-source development, chatting with other Typst users, and getting quick answers. This space has grown to over 11,000 members, which is just awesome.

We would like to thank everyone who engages in our community, be it on the Typst repository on GitHub, by posting on our Forum, publishing on Typst Universe, or by chatting on the Discord! You make Typst better and we hope that it can give something back to you in return.

With all of this progress over the past two years, we felt that our old landing page did not do the best job of representing all that Typst is. Hence, we are launching a new landing page today. It highlights all the ways that Typst can help you if you are writing technical documents. The beautiful drawings that showcase the diverse set of use cases people have for Typst were created by Joey. Check out his work.

To make it even easier to get started with Typst, we have also created a new interactive playground at https://typst.app/play. There, you can experiment with the Typst language and app without signing up first. We've seen many times that just showing Typst to people and letting them play around with it is the best way to introduce them to Typst. For this reason, the new playground is linked as the most prominent destination on our new landing page.

Last but not least, we have added an entirely new, dedicated open source page that shows off the Typst compiler, explains how you can download it, and tells you more about our approach to open source in an FAQ.

If you recall our old landing page, you may have noticed that the new page represents a bit of a vibe shift. As opposed to before, academic writing is not our only focus anymore. This shift is based on real experience we had with our users. Having started Typst out of university to scratch our own itch with paper writing and assignments, Laurenz and I originally positioned it as a tool for students and researchers, knowing that Typst was good at that.

However, with a growing user base, we have seen proof that Typst solves real problems in industries like Cybersecurity, Finance, Aerospace, and Engineering. Using a document writing platform can be an enabler for professionals in more than one way. A crucial aspect of this is that teams can build domain-specific templates and automations with Typst. This scales all the way to generating complete deliverables from machine-readable files.

In this new world, Typst is deployed by industry-leading enterprises: IABG is deploying Typst On-Premises in their aerospace department while the cybersecurity company Neodyme is using Typst On-Premises to work on client reports. Typst sees usage well into the Fortune 500, for example at UBS. We are a part of the bank's journey to create transactional documents more scalably with Typst Open Source Support. And of course, Typst is used in more than 3,500 laboratories and universities worldwide. If you ever hesitated to recommend Typst before, know that Typst users are in good company.

We don't want to stop here: Our mission is still to become the best solution for technical writing. That is why we will soon release Typst 0.14 with PDF accessibility as a marquee feature: Regular PDF files are notoriously difficult to use with Assistive Technologies like screen readers. That makes them inaccessible to some disabled users and creates a compliance problem with the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and other regulations. With Typst 0.14, your documents will become accessible by default, tagged for use with Assistive Technologies. Beyond this, you will be able to opt into explicit PDF/UA (Universal Access) export and make sure that your documents meet high accessibility standards and pass automated checkers.

Accessible PDF output will join features like show and set rules, data loading, and HTML export (in preview) to allow you to use Typst in production, no matter what your requirements might be.

With all the growth of our software, our company, and our community under our belt, our brand-new landing page, and Typst 0.14 close to completion, we are excited to take you with us on another two years and beyond of our journey to make technical writing more productive. If you are excited too, let someone know about Typst today! Regardless of whether your team is facing a document challenge or you and your friends are on the verge of getting started with your theses -- let us solve the problem of technical writing for you.