Pandoc isn't a typesetter, it's more a translation engine between various typesetting languages (and it can then call the typesetter).

Pandoc is a ridiculously underrated and powerful tool but it solves a different problem. Someone still has to write typesetters ;)

If you are just creating a simple document with default styling, the main advantage you get from Typst is near-instant compilation speed. Pandoc to HTML is similar though, but if you’re generating PDFs with LaTeX the compilation delays can be pretty annoying.

If you are creating more complex documents, the advantages become more pronounced. Styling in Pandoc means modifying templates, at which point you’re just writing LaTeX, and styling in Typst is much nicer than in LaTeX. You can also hit the limits of Pandoc templates quite easily, at which point you have to write Lua filters. I have found those to be quite cumbersome, and now your document logic is spread out over the Markdown source file, the LaTeX template, and the Lua filters. In Typst you can have a single file with your whole document in a clean modern format, and you can decide for yourself how much you want to separate content and presentation.

These are different categories of software.

Typst is a way to define a document. Headers, paragraphs, figures, equations, tables, etc. it is a direct competitor to LaTeX and maybe in some ways similar to Word, which provides a GUI for an XML defined document.

Pandoc is a converter, which given a document in one document description language outputs a document in another document description language.

What is exciting about Typst HTML support is that its goal is that it has first class support for both PDF and HTMl, which is obviously preferable to something like pandoc, which always has to rely on an intermediate representation of the document, before a conversion can happen.

PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or less?) maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in PanDoc, plus allows embedding other formats when necessary, or conditionally include some content only for some output formats.

It's a great format to use for editing, since it converts so well to all the other formats (including Typst?).

https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#pandocs-markdown

>PanDoc has its own version of Markdown that (more or less?) maps 1:1 to the intermediate representation in PanDoc

Which is bad if you want a complex document, since the intermediate representation of pandoc can not represent all typst features.

Also, I do not understand what your argument is. Pandoc and typst are not competing, they are different pieces of software with different goals. Pandocs markdown is also not competing with typst, since they are completely different ways to define a document. Typst is vastly more complex, it even includes its own scripting language. Pandoc also doesn't output PDF, except by calling some external tool, which then compiles a pandoc output format to HTML. It is fundamentally different to typst.

I agree they are not competing at all, and I will definitely consider Typst as an alternative to LaTeX, which to me is one of the output formats I use in PanDoc, and I might end up using Typst instead of LaTeX as an intermediate format when generating PDFs. I have not had to fall back to write LaTeX in several years and tend to get away with at most a few lines of inlined LaTeX in my Markdown files, and I expect it will be possible to inline some Typst code if necessary as well. Happy with PanDoc's Lua filters when I need to script something.

And, HTML leads to epubs since epub is essentially HTML.

PanDoc has Typst as an output format, so it should be possible to just keep using PanDoc Markdown (for instance) and just switch to Typst output if that is (or becomes) better than LaTeX.

I use pandoc to convert markdown to physical books (with typst) and ebooks (epub) for my self-publishing empire.

In addition to what the other commentors write, an advantage of Typst is that it is self-contained:

You just need one (large) executable to do everything, whereas with PanDoc you (by default) need to have LaTeX installed if you want to generate PDFs