August 20, 2025· 1 min read· typst

Hello Typst: Math-Heavy Posts, Natively

#typst#meta#math

Why Typst?

LaTeX is a 40-year-old toolchain held together by duct tape and prayer. Typst compiles in milliseconds, has sane syntax, and its math notation is actually readable. This entire post is a .typ file compiled to HTML at build time.

The dispersion relation

For a chalcogenide waveguide, the propagation constant expands as:

𝛽 (𝜔) = 𝛽_{0} + 𝛽_{1} (𝜔 - 𝜔_{0}) + \frac{𝛽_{2}}{2} {(𝜔 - 𝜔_{0})}^{2} + \dots

where $𝛽_{2} = d^{2} \frac{𝛽}{d} 𝜔^{2} |_{𝜔_{0}}$ is the group-velocity dispersion parameter, usually quoted in ps^2/m.

Generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation

Supercontinuum evolution obeys (broken across lines for readability):

\begin{aligned} \frac{d 𝐴}{d 𝑧} & = 𝑖 \sum_{𝑘 \geq 2} \frac{𝑖^{𝑘 + 1} 𝛽_{𝑘}}{𝑘!} \frac{d^{𝑘} 𝐴}{d 𝑇^{𝑘}} \\ + 𝑖 𝛾 (1 + \frac{𝑖}{𝜔_{0}} \frac{d}{d 𝑇}) 𝐴 (𝑧, 𝑇) \int_{- \infty}^{\infty} 𝑅 (𝑇^{'}) | 𝐴 (𝑇 - 𝑇^{'}) |^{2} d 𝑇^{'} \end{aligned}

Yes, that fits on one line. Try that in Word.

A quick table

Material	$𝛽_{2}$ @ 1550 nm	Nonlinear index $𝑛_{2}$
SiO₂	+0.026 ps^2/m	$2.6 \times 10^{- 20}$ m^2/W
As₂S₃	−0.010 ps^2/m	$3.0 \times 10^{- 18}$ m^2/W
As₂Se₃	−0.049 ps^2/m	$1.2 \times 10^{- 17}$ m^2/W

And code blocks work too

import numpy as np

def gvd(beta2: float, L: float) -> float:
    """Accumulated GVD over length L."""
    return beta2 * L

Closing thought

Expect more equation-dense posts in this format. The markdown pipeline isn’t going anywhere. Now there are simply two ways to write here.