A New Typst Template for Pandoc (2025)

I have to say having been a diehard latex person I tried out typst a few weeks ago and within a day I was producing beautiful documents with equations that were as nice as Latex and wildly less of a pita to type. I'm going to be using it for all my study notes from now on.

And a couple of docs I converted from latex went from about 10s to compile in latex to 10ms to compile in typst. I didn't think this would be a big deal since my docs aren't that big and I didn't feel like I was waiting long for compile but I'm already much more productive as a result.

Having said all of that, I have no idea why you would want pandoc or markdown involved. Typst (unlike latex) is really no harder than markdown to type, so you should just be using typst rather than markdown if that's what you want. Then you don't need pandoc in the mix at all.

I got a beautiful Latex template for my master thesis many years ago. I still remember fixing some things and it took me multiple days to figure out how this giant tangled web of a template worked. A year ago I tried to recreate the same look in a typst document. It took me less than a day to build it from scratch. Typst is genuinely one of the most awesome things I have seen in the last few years.

I wish the article showed what the markdown format for working with typst and pandoc looked like, and what an output PDF looked like. I have no idea whether I'm interested or not from this article

Very nice! I also like working from pandoc where possible - being able to split the output into a latex/typst file as well as a docx is very handy, especially when working with collaborators who are more comfortable with word. I wish markdown would see more support in scientific writing - it would solve so many of the headaches with formatting etc (and reduce microsoft's dominance in research)

Incidentally, I developed my own template for a markdown rendering pipeline: markdown -> pandoc -> typst, with mermaid diagrams.

This works very, very well. I get linked in-document references, diagrams, tables, table of contents — everything I need for my design documents (and consulting work).

This template is a great starting point. I have tweaked [0] it for A4 and two-column output, if anybody is interested.

[0]: https://www.bobek.cz/til/pandoc-markdown-typst/

From the article:

Last summer … Fast-forward to spring 2025. In the intervening months, Typst has been upgraded twice (to v0.13) and Pandoc has upgraded at least 3 times (currently at v3.6.4), and my templates don’t work anymore.

This template is from March 2025, and we're now May 2026, with four more releases to Typst 0.14.2 (December 12, 2025), and with Pandoc 3.9.0.2 (2026-03-19).

At the risk of making a fool of myself in-front of the rest of the class, I will come out and admit I don't know what the article is talking about.

> Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF.

I understand that Typst is a markup language that can output a pdf file (big Typst fan btw).

I understand Pandoc is a thing that transforms documents of one kind to documents of another, ie markdown to html.

But the author wants to "typeset markdown-formatted article to PDF". Which makes me wonder what this has to do with typst at all.

Thank you kind person for posting this. I've just started my Pandoc journey formatting books for reading in a secondhand Sony DPT-RP1.