Usually in the academic journals especially concerning computational chemistry or physical chemistry, Portable Document File (PDF) format is the choice for images in articles. I have been writing my Ph.D. thesis in these days using Typst. Those who are not familiar with it, it is a new programming language for typesetting. It can be seen as the alternative to \(\LaTeX\). It compiles very fast and is not heavy and slow like \(\LaTeX\). I learned it quite fast, it took me only 4 hours train journey to learn it. It should be clear by now that how low the learning curve is. And the better part is one does not need to wait 1 min to compile their large thesis. So I took the challenge to write my thesis in Typst which is not a common thing to do in our field as everyone is indoctrinated by \(\LaTeX\). I had only one fear while starting to write - most of my graphs and plots generated during my Ph.D. time is all in PDF file format. Some of the scripts I even lost. But I thought - “no problem I will convert them into SVG”. But then I found out that a development version of Typst is supporting the PDF file format as images. I used it and I was happy. But now I am even more happy to share you the news that Typst is supporting native PDF files as images in their latest release of 0.14. So more reasons to use Typst now. It is just as simple as the following syntax.
#figure(
image("image_filename.pdf", width: 75%),
caption: [Fancy Caption]
)One note for VSCode users is - try to use the pre-release version of tinymist extension otherwise it might raise an error of “image type not supported”. I hope the tinymist team fixes it soon.
Until then enjoy. And yes I am very happy that I took the decision of writing my Ph.D. thesis in Typst and not in \(\LaTeX\). I enjoy so much seeing my writing being compiled almost with zero latency.