Typst and other LaTeX competitors
Modern LaTeX
LaTeX has been the standard in technical document preparation for decades. Has a potential replacement finally arrived?
In the late 1970s, mathematician Donald Knuth brought something new into the world: a typesetting system called TeX [1]. Markup languages for typesetting documents already existed, but their output was of poor quality. They were especially poor at typesetting mathematics, a problem of particular concern to Knuth.
The result was astonishing in the beauty of the output it generated. Gordon Bell, the Vice President of Engineering at the Digital Equipment Corporation, claimed [2] that the TeX system "in terms of importance could rank near the introduction of the Gutenberg press."
TeX, free software in all senses of the term, was different not only in that it produced output on par with high-quality manual typography; it was also a programming language, albeit a tricky one to program in.
[...]
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