Like other commentators, I have worked with LaTeX for a long time (> 10 years) and have to say that it very much shows its age.

For once, the compilation time is terrible - it can take several minutes to compile a typical document. I recently tried to create a poster for a conference - a single A0 page - and even this took more than a minute to compile. Because positioning in images and figures in LaTeX is not obvious, this made iteration extremely slow.

Additionally, by forgetting a single bracket, one can easily encounter cryptic error messages relating to boxes. In the past, I have also worked on LaTeXML (the LaTeX-to-HTML "converter" amongst other things being used to power ar5iv [1]). Even though this exposed me to some of (La)TeX's internals, it is still extremely difficult trying to decipher error messages.

Typst, on the other hand, is much faster when compiling and provides much clearer error messages.

For this reason, I also decided to write my 130-something PhD dissertation in Typst [2]. My university only provided a LaTeX and a Word template, but I ended up copying that in Typst extremely quickly. My thesis compiles in about 7 seconds on my laptop - I cannot imagine how long it would take had I chosen LaTeX instead. Not only that, when I showed an initial draft of my dissertation to my supervisor - also a decades-long LaTeX user - he could not tell that I wasn't using LaTeX.

I only really encountered one problem with Typst so far - citation styles. In particular, the alphanumeric style preferred by my field produced duplicate citation keys, making the output unreadable in printed form. But given all the other benefits Typst offered, I ended up switching to IEEE's citation style instead.

I am also hoping that Typst improves its HTML export - it is very barebones at the moment - but that seems to be in the works [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36947004

[2] https://doi.org/10.25593/open-fau-1825

[3] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/5512

Hey, I've had the same problem with duplicate citation keys! I couldn't find an issue on it. One of us should file a bug report.