Typst

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 4 years (2023–2026), in 7 threads.

People raised many different problems with Typst, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 11 complaints

CSL citation style renders incorrectly, forcing manual hand-typeset citations and bibliography2026-09-25
Unclear where function calls end; a space before trailing bracket causes an error2025-10-30
Current math mode behavior is very unintuitive to the commenter2025-10-30
CSL citation style renders incorrectly, forcing manual hand-typeset citations and bibliography2025-10-24
PDF/A-2b output failed the university's compliance test, requiring manual conversion and many experiments2025-09-29
Unescaped words act as markup or math meaning, causing confusion and wrong typesetting2025-09-28
Couldn't figure out how to customize the existing templates2025-09-27
Concise error messages make debugging tricky, and a syntax error produces no PDF2025-09-27
Typst's math syntax differs from TeX, so existing TeX knowledge must be relearned before use2025-03-09
Must convert PDF figures to SVG or raster formats before embedding, adding friction2023-10-29
Formatting a single word or sentence requires too much syntax work2023-03-21