Have been using Pandoc for a long time now to make presentations by using the default beamer template. Nothing fancy, as it's not something to be spending a lot of time on. Wanted to keep writing simple Markdown but now that Pandoc supports using Typst as the PDF engine, getting rid of some 2.5 GB of LaTeX packages installed on the system is easier than ever.
Pandoc keeps a store of all the default templates it uses for different outputs, and one can tell Pandoc to show the default template for any given format, like below.
pandoc -D typst > template.typ
Then adding this diatypst template to the preceding, gets pretty close to the earlier setup. Specifying an engine and a Typst template to Pandoc can be done like below.
--pdf-engine=typst --template=template.typ
Still need to figure out a few things like using different colours for links/URLs but good enough for now. Believe one can use raw Typst in the markdown for that. A sample setup using what was just described can be seen here.