I recently responded to someone on Mastodon who asked about producing decent-looking PDFs from markdown. I replied eagerly with “OMG Typst!” and linked to my earlier blogpost about developing an entire book layout template for Pandoc and Typst. The response I then received was this was “far beyond” what they need – and on reflection I had to admit that my blog post was a bit, well, niche.
I recalled that a decade ago, when Pandoc was new (or at least I was new to Pandoc), I produced a set of tutorials for producing high-quality EPUBs from Pandoc, and that these were quite well received. These days I find EPUB pretty uninteresting,[1] but I’m still using Pandoc for a variety of purposes, and especially using it to drive PDF (that is, “print”) production via Typst. Typst emerged as an output option for Pandoc sometime last year and since then has gotten even smarter and smoother.
So here’s an attempt at a basic tutorial for using Typst with Pandoc to produce beautiful – and easily customizable – PDFs and indeed printed pages.