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Comment by rendaw | Hacker News Reader

This, Typst, etc etc are primarily typesetting systems for papers.

I would love alternatives to HTML or whatever, but I tried Typst too and it's very clear that the authors only really care about typesetting for papers and other long form prose. Stuff like forms, invoices, flyers, handouts, leaflets, business cards -- an afterthought, at best.

Edit: Actually I was thinking of Sile not Typst, but I think the same applies to Typst too. I didn't dig into Typst too much because it was commercial though.

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> Stuff like forms, invoices, flyers, handouts, leaflets, business cards -- an afterthought, at best.

It is because you can typeset beautiful long text algorithmically and all these small forms like invoices and flyers are more graphical design than typesetting: you need to place many small elements precisely, not relative to each other but to the edges of the page / optical centers / etc. It is not very convenient without WYSIWYG. Possible, yes, but will require many trial-and-error when in WYSIWYG layout program can be done from first try.

Think about tabloids too: text, which wraps around non-rectangualr images, cut-outs, etc. Hard to do without seeing what you do, only with text and coordinates.

Edit: typo test → text.

I don't agree. Plenty of people write HTML by hand, no WYSIWYG, often with no more than a live preview pane like Typst's.

Why isn't it easy to place something relative to the edges of a page via text? In HTML I do `padding: 2cm` and I'm done. I'd say most of design involves placing elements relative to eachother; half the constraints in GUI design tools are matching spacing or aligning to nearby elements.

I'm not saying you can do the whole thing blind, but for the odd thing that does need visual feedback, not having a convenient UI isn't a critical failure. Some of those things are hard to do in a GUI too, and having a good text based layout tool could be easier.

On the other hand, all "official-looking" documents like invoices (with complex headers and footers) I seen in HTML was ungodly mess of nested tables, not something clean and structured.

I don't say it is impossible. But looks like it is hard.

Is there any reason why you can't use Typst for any of the stuff you mentioned? I can't see why you couldn't (except for interactive forms, which is already being worked on [1]. The pdf-writer low-level backend seems to have already implemented support for form fields, so it seems like a matter of time until it is implemented in Typst).

[1] https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/1765

I believe you can do those sorts of layouts in Typst (and Latex, and Sile!), but it's about how far out of the way you have to go and how much you fight the system in the process. I don't see any examples of Typst doing anything other than papers, I believe for good reason.

To be clear, I mean from a design perspective. Like take a print copy of Wired... how hard would it be to replicate any of those pages? Without using other software (aside from maybe cutting up stock photos). I can format scientific papers in HTML and it's not too hard, I can also format a cookbook, and it's not that hard. It's not great either!

Honestly, I don't think that it would be too hard. With the grid function you can do a lot of things, specially because you can use grid.cell(rowspan:3, colswap:4) to make cells that span multiple rows or columns, use fractional sizes for the columns (1fr, 2fr, etc), and add independent insets and strokes for each cell, so you can already do a lot of the things you can achieve with css flexbox.

Though I suppose the docs could include tutorials for how to use them to make a more diverse kind of documents, and adding another layout function that behaves more like flexbox would be nice (though it wouldn't be too hard to create a function that re-creates the behaviour of flexbox based on the grid function).

I found it much easier to use Typst to create any of these documents than any other software I used before. Just loading data from a JSON and incrementally regenerating the document on each change is game-changing for me.

You definitely can, I designed a 206x85cm standing banner for my last trade show as one of the first "production" things I built in Typst:

https://typst.app/project/r1YNDcKpoF1sVXHf5n4VKB

Plus you can share the rendered and preview form of the project with a single link, which is pretty neat.

The online editor is commercial. They have a github repository releasing Typst under an Apache 2.0 license for free. I installed it using cargo (Rust), and don't use the online editor.

Oh, I didn't realize that! I can't shake the feeling that the open source community engagement might cater to paying customers, but I'll need to take a closer look!

You can use typst locally and bypass the commercial bits. It is really easy to create different kinds of documents with it. I have been using it to create slides and handouts, and for that I already find it much easier to use than the alternatives.

Can you make slides and handouts from the same primary document? That'd save me an inordinate amount of time for some church use-cases.

Look at Quarto. Markdown input, basically any output you want, including HTML, PDF, DOCX, PPTX, etc... All from the same input. Reuse text chunks, use variables, templates, and more. Then just run 'quarto render'.

Thanks!

My first "real" usecase for Typst was a poster [0], since it was much easier than doing it in LaTeX. It's missing some features, like wrapping around figures and flowing text between boxes, but TeX doesn't have the second either and both are planned in Typst.

[0]: https://dvdkon.ggu.cz/projects/pppql/poster.pdf

Flowing text between boxes can be done with flowfram, which is old and clunky, but works OK.

I might be using Typst wrong, but it's like a visual programming environment. I guess I found my jsfiddle or other tools that other people use.

It's very satisfying to play with visualizations in Typst, especially since it updates the output so fast (instant for small projects).

You may be familiar already, but does paged.js fit your bill?

[0]: https://github.com/pagedjs/pagedjs

That looks interesting, and to be fair right now I'm doing something similar... but doing headless rendering with that sort of stuff is very hard, AFAIK the standard tool for that has been abandoned now for a couple years. Also there are other issues with browsers, like creating CMYK PDFs.

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