February 15, 2026
Kerning wars ignite
Benchmarking Automatic Typesetting Systems
Speed vs Beauty: Typst sprints while TeX fans shout “but look at the lines”
TLDR: A head‑to‑head test shows Typst blazing through 500 pages while others lag, sparking a split between speed‑chasers and typography purists. Commenters debate whether default settings make the test fair and if fast is worth it when line breaks and spacing quality tell a different story.
The internet is feasting on a juicy face‑off: a developer benchmarked six tools that turn letters into PDFs—and the numbers sparked a duel between Team Speed and Team Pretty Text. In one page, the homegrown speedata Publisher and new kid Typst were neck‑and‑neck. But at 500 pages, Typst went full rocket ship—about 157ms total—while others jogged or crawled. WeasyPrint slid from “fine” to “grab a coffee,” and the old school LaTeX combo held up better than expected.
Then came the drama: the output looks different. Some tools pick line breaks for a whole paragraph to keep spacing smooth (the classic TeX way), others seem to go line‑by‑line, which can create awkward gaps. That’s where loyalties split. One commenter cheered, basically: “Typst is fastest, but I’ll still use speedata for catalogs,” framing a classic heart vs. head dilemma. Another pressed the big question: are we testing defaults or tuning each tool to its best? Because fiddling with settings can crush raw speed tests.
Spice level rose when a Typst dev chimed in to say they actually use the famous paragraph‑wide method by default (minus one fancy spacing rule). Cue meme madness: “fast like Rust, picky like TeX,” “rocket vs calligraphy,” and the eternal forum chant—speed or beauty?
Key Points
- •Benchmark compares six tools (speedata Publisher, Typst, pdflatex, LuaLaTeX, WeasyPrint, Apache FOP) on identical mail-merge PDFs from XML.
- •On 1 page, sp (95 ms) and Typst (106 ms) lead; others range 329–532 ms (3.5–5.6x slower).
- •On 500 pages, Typst is fastest at 157 ms total (~0.3 ms/page); sp is 4.4 s (~8.7 ms/page); WeasyPrint is 8.7 s (~17.3 ms/page).
- •pdflatex scales well in batch (712 ms total; ~0.8 ms/page after startup), while WeasyPrint scales poorly.
- •Output quality differs: pdflatex and sp use Knuth–Plass (paragraph-wide); Typst clarified it uses Knuth–Plass by default (without tightness classes); WeasyPrint and FOP appear line-by-line.