A Love Letter to Typst

I rewrote my resume in a new markup-based typesetting system called Typst.

My resume has been written in LaTeX since college. I found a template on Overleaf, tweaked it, and added my information. LaTeX is a hard language to learn and become proficient with. It is unlike any programming language I have ever used. The syntax is extremely foreign, and creating development environments has been something I’ve struggled with. I haven’t touched LaTeX other than to create my resume, and reports in college for a computer science class wich required them.

A couple months back, I had read about Typst. I thought it looked pretty promising, but didn’t really think anything else of it. Then about two weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to learn something new, and I thought that Typst might be the perfect opportunity. I wanted to try to rewrite my resume in it, so that is what I set out to do for the next two weeks, which brings us to today.

I learned enough Typst to successfully create a resume I am proud of. It leans heavily into my resume’s previous design, but has some more design improvements. With Typst, I was able to move all the content into YAML files, while keeping the style and layout in Typst files. Only having to update a YAML file to edit my resume is going to be a great time-saver in the future; I won’t be needing to edit code.

Needless to say, I have completely fallen for Typst. It is an amazing technology. If I ever need a typesetting system again, I know exactly what I will be reaching for.

The source code for my resume is hosted on SourceHut. A compiled PDF is hosted on this site if you want to see how it turned out.