Allow compile function to take a string as input

[slashformotion]

Would it be possible to have a compile function that take a string as a parameter ?

[ok-nick]

I need to generate tens of thousands of individual pdfs, all that reference a unique path. To do that, I generate a .typ file that imports my template and calls it with the unique paths as parameters. The problem is that having to generate a temporary file per pdf is extremely slow, especially at such a large scale. It would be much more performant to skip this step entirely and pass a string or byte array directly to typst.

My use case is a workaround to this issue: typst/typst#295

[JCGoran]

This seems like a very handy feature, and it would also make the package more "Pythonic" IMO. By more "Pythonic", consider for instance the built-in json module; the json.load function loads from a stream:

with open(file, 'r') as f:
    data = json.load(f)

while the json.loads function loads it from a string, which should be valid JSON:

data = json.load([VALID_JSON_STRING])

Making typst.compile work the same way would therefore bring it inline with the interface of the standard lib.
However, from reading a bit through the codebase(s), it seems (from my limited understanding at least) that this would need to be implemented at the level of the typst library/compiler itself, not this wrapper, as the Rust compile method takes a file as input.
Note that typst projects can involve multiple files, making this a bit complex to implement in full generality.

@ok-nick regarding your particular issue, have you considered using a RAM disk/temp filesystem as a workaround? If on Linux, mounting a dir as a tmpfs can potentially lead to significant performance gains (just make sure all of the files you are using for I/O are exclusively in that dir).

[ok-nick]

That'd be a good workaround for now, I'll have to try it out.

[66Leo66]

I think this feature request is really useful for automation/scripting tasks that need to generate a (maybe simple) document without messing with temp files. typst-cli already accepts compile from stdin: typst/typst#3339. It would be cool if similar approach could be taken so that typst-py could support working with "fake files" (as added in the mentioned PR).

[messense]

Pull requests are welcome.