I used to use LaTeX back then in college to write my stuff. I didn't know anything about it but I really liked the concept and the userbase felt like an ivory tower kinda thing so my young self thought it was a good idea to learn it while using it. Bwahahaha! If I had that many satoshis how many underfull/overfull hbox messages I've seen! Geez... I was told that I write what I write and the program takes care about the typesetting. Instead it takes care to complain about as many small detail as possible. Second, every single problem I faced was solved by usepackage{}. Want colors? Usepackage{}! Want graphics? Usepackage{}! Want anything else than the lame as fuck defaults? Youguessedit{}! So there I was knee deep in confusion and sleep deprivation in the midst of exams and deadlines. Thank you or I should say FUCK YOU LaTeX!
But this shit was still bugging me. As a FOSS hippie like me I refused to use microdick worms and such. Also I still liked the idea of programmatic typesetting! So after some years of hiatus I tried plain TeX at my office job. The experience was somewhat better, I managed to get the desired result cleaner and faster but nonetheless TeX is still a 40 something years old software. Font handling, graphics, colors are almost as painful as before. No surprise since LaTeX is built on top of TeX. My biggest concern was that I needed to install hundreds of packages just to get TeX working. Seriously? I don't know why a single executable can't do the job but ok...
Years later after I have abandoned TeX I tried groff. By now you probably can tell this is mental autofellatio and you'd be right. Groff offers to be fast, simple and forgiving in terms of generated warnings. M'kay lemme see. It is fast, cannot deny, but besides being very old software so almost everything needs to be a workaround of a workaround it has one major flaw to me. One must decide which macroset to use: me, mm, mdoc? I mean it's worse than LaTeX in this regard imho and for what I intended to use it for. But I wrote(?) sweat-and-tears my reports such that it's quality and simplicity was acceptlable for me.
And a few days earlier I came across with the project called typst. I approached it with certain but understandable skepticism, and lo and behold, it is up and running after installing one (as in 1) package, compiles fast, complains less, the results are decent, can do many things out of the box and here I am as sold. This is what I was looking for. This is what I was waiting for. I am now a typst believer. A project which is still very young. Halle fuckin' lujah! I managed to rewrite my reports from groff to typst in a matter of hours net in the span of a few days and I'm so badly sold on this!
also gm...