Support for Typst compiler

[Sirra630]

Hey there,

I just wanted to give a shoutout to your team for creating such an awesome software! It's seriously changed the game for me and I am eager to encourage my coworkers to adopt it as well. However, some of my coworkers who are used to using Word are finding the math typing system (based on Latex) a bit too complicated.

I recently stumbled upon an alternative to Latex called Typst. It's an open-source document formatting system that offers a more intuitive way to write math and has some interesting design decisions. What I particularly like about Typst is the fast compilation time, which provides almost instant previews. This is possible because the team behind Typst has opted for an incremental compilation process and a compiler written in Rust.

Although the project is still young and the design will likely evolve, a simple writer/reader has already been implemented in Pandoc (see here). I was wondering if it would be possible to have support for Typst in Quarto in the future, maybe as a dedicated PDF engine?

Thanks for considering this idea!

[jjallaire]

Hi @Sirra630, thanks for the feedback! We are working on typst support in Quarto at this very moment! This will show up in the pre-release v1.4 builds once v1.3 has shipped (likely by end of April). Will post back here when there is something for you to try.

[Sirra630]

That's amazing, thank you for this great work !

[baptiste]

I was thinking about possible integrations, should Typst become mature enough that it's a robust alternative to TeX (still a long way to go). I could imagine 3 different routes for quarto-typst interactions:

1. Author in Typst (optionally, of course), which is pre-processed into a standardised qmd intermediate input to be treated as usual by Quarto.
   This has the advantage of providing some access to novel features, such as the programmable layout and drawing features of typst's mini-language (which, incidentally, I wish had been picked from a standard one like Lua/Ocaml/etc. :S)

2. Author in qmd, process via pandoc using Typst instead of TeX as intermediate
   Definitely the pragmatic way to go short-term, especially with pandoc's reader/writer support, but it doesn't make full use of Typst's potential, and the qmd/md-pandoc syntax may someday become a real bottleneck (cf. Butterick's gripes with markdown)

3. Progressively evolve the qmd format to be more like Typst (probably difficult/impossible given the constraints of jupyter notebooks). Still, having such a mini-language built into the format could open new possibilities. Djot is another source of inspiration, to take the good things about markdown, but also go further, and I believe Typst and Pollen are two examples of an even more flexible paradigm (where the whole documents are programmable).

Anyway, just some thoughts about these exciting new developments!

[jjallaire]

Current work in progress on this is here: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/tree/feature/typst (you can try it out by installing the development version as noted in the PR description).

@baptiste Note that you can use raw blocks to include typst markup directly in a .qmd.

[mcanouil]

Closing this as part of Quarto 1.4 (currently in pre-release state), see https://quarto.org/docs/prerelease/1.4/typst.html.