Typst or LaTeX? Styling PDF documents with Quarto extensions

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that allows you to combine text with code to create fully reproducible documents in a variety of formats. The addition of custom styling to documents can make them look more professional and recognisable. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of ways to create customised PDF documents using Quarto. Until recently, this meant getting to grips with LaTeX. Now, there’s a new kid on the block: Typst. Typst is an open-source typesetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use.

Extensions are a powerful way to modify and extend the behaviour of Quarto, including adding styling to your documents with LaTeX or Typst. To demonstrate the differences between LaTeX and Typst, I’ll walk through the process of converting a LaTeX-based style extension to Typst, allowing users to easily switch between them. We’ll compare the two – discussing error messages (we all get them!), render time, and customisability along the way.