The good, bad, and complicated of writing a PhD thesis in typst

I recently finished my PhD thesis, and something I don’t think anyone would notice reading the document is that the whole thing was written in typst.

I wrote a short blog post about what worked well and what I think can still be improved over at https://fransskarman.com/phd_thesis_in_typst.html

As a short TL;DR, it is absolutely possible to do, for me the advantages of typst outweigh the advantages of LaTeX, but there are of course things left to be desired. Apart from the bibliography, there was nothing I wasn’t able to get exactly as I wanted.

Side note, hopefully just linking to an offsite blog is OK. For the curious, the website and blog post are also written in typst which was surprisingly enjoyable.

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Congratulations on finishing your thesis, and good luck for the public defense!

Are you willing to share your thesis repository with the actual Typst code? I already tried looking through your GitLab but I couldn’t find anything.

Oh that would be kind of nice to do, wouldn’t it :D I’ll have to think about how to do it though, I don’t want to include the sources of unpublished papers yet

Are you talking about unpublished papers in the same repository as the thesis? Since the thesis itself is already available online, the source code should not contain any “secrets” (unless you removed something from the thesis that would then still be available in some commit).

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The publication is a bit strange here. It is a 50-60 page preamble followed by papers. In the physical version these are all included but in the version that is published online, only the preamble is included for copyright reasons.

But now that I think about it, the copyright reasons are only because of publishers, and that’s only on the final PDF anyway so making it public should be fine.

The repository does not seem to be actually public yet? I can only see the members of the repository, but there is no code anywhere.

Oops, gitlab UI being intuitive as always. I had to also make accessing the repo public…

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