Typst

I hate writing (research) in Word. It breaks in weird ways, it forces you to mix thinking about formatting with thinking about the text, it's sometimes slow for no reason, and using styles is a lost art that apparently only I know about. And there are thousands of pages of memes about how annoying it is to put a figure in a document and get it to go where you want it to go.

Google Docs is a slightly better writing experience, but its inability to create a custom style for text means that anything besides basic text is annoying. And citing papers, especially in shared documents, is a recipe for disaster. The lack of custom styles really makes it hard to consistently format a bibliography.

I enjoyed writing in LaTeX, because it allowed me to separate formatting a document from the content of the document (well, mostly). And having the document in plain text makes it possible to troubleshoot when things go wrong. It's definitely a vibe, though, and it takes a lot to get started. Tools like Overleaf make it slightly easier, but it's still a bit of a lift, especially if you're submitting to a journal or conference that hasn't already made a template for you.

Recently I found Typst (https://typst.app/), a new document writing and formatting environment that is trying to be the next big thing. So far, I'm a huge fan. It's got a markdown-like syntax for writing/structuring a document. It's got LaTeX-like citations, with easy customizability. It's got a pretty easy-to-understand scripting language for doing more complex layouts or repeatable formatting. It's got a nice, responsive web app with real-time collaboration and a real-time preview. And it has a template format that is much easier to understand for customizing the formatting of your document to meet the requirements of various conferences and journals.

I spent a few hours last week learning how the formatting works to create a template for the upcoming AMCIS conference. And I can say, having done it before for ICIS in LaTeX, Typst is way better to work with. I had a bit of trouble formatting the author block for the camera-ready version, but it was still easier than the struggles I went through to get the ICIS template working. And the scripting capabilities make it easy to have the initial submission and final submission in the same template with just a small argument change to enable the author block.

So here's hoping I've found the next cool thing for acadmic writing. Once the AMCIS template package gets published (GitHub PR here), I'll publish another post with instructions on how to use it. Most of what you need is there in the example, though.