Typst book support?

[jimjam-slam]

Description

Does anyone know if Quarto's new Typst output format works with book project types? It isn't mentioned in the format list for books, and I haven't been able to convert my current book projects to use it, but I would love to see it built in at some point—seems like a perfect match!

(💡 I imagine you could jury-rig a single PDF from several docs with includes!)

[mcanouil]

For now, Typst is only for simple document and in the 1.4 pre-release.
Also it does not support yet all Quarto features, so that's something to add to the list.

[jimjam-slam]

No worries!

[rwaaijman]

just wondering if typst already support book projects?

[cscheid]

@ratnanil yes. But the difference is that those are in the Typst "universe"; if we make a book typst template, that will be Quarto's default. So we can't really choose any of those until one of them emerges as the community default for Typst.

[ratnanil]

yes that makes sense, thanks!

[roaldarbol]

@ratnanil yes. But the difference is that those are in the Typst "universe"; if we make a book typst template, that will be Quarto's default. So we can't really choose any of those until one of them emerges as the community default for Typst.

Is this being tracked in an issue somewhere? What would it take for you to decide on one?

[mcanouil]

Is this being tracked in an issue somewhere?

I don't think there is, at least not attached to this discussion.

What would it take for you to decide on one?

Time mostly. And it's not about "decide on one", as explained by Carlos it's about making a Quarto one that fulfil all the Quarto requirements and that can be maintain by the team.

[roaldarbol]

Ah, no, I didn't mean "one" as in one template, I meant the requirements, the fields, etc. that would be needed. In the end, I guess it's a matter of making a decision-making; Typst has matured a lot over the past year when this post was first written, so maybe it's a conversation that would merit an issue. Then we could begin clarifying what the next steps would be and what the "right questions" are that need answering (and I know you're all busy, so I'm not expecting fast action, but a first step where y'all could pitch in).

[MichelDSchmid]

I would like to take the liberty of providing a little input on this as well.
We use Quarto to create learning scripts for vocational students. Our aim is to have two versions (HTML and PDF), as identical as possible. Since these are technical professions, we use chapter numbering. That's why we use the "Book" project for Quarto. With Latex, however, we use the srcreprt document class, as in the example on the Quarto homepage. This would theoretically already be possible in typst ;-)
This only as an application purpose

regards
Mike

[roaldarbol]

To take a slightly different approach to the question: What would it take to support a custom Typst book/thesis template to work with a Quarto book? Is it as simple as following the custom Quarto/Typst template guide? So if I've already got a Typst book template that I want to port to Quarto, do I just go ahead, or are there reasons it might not work? (I'm asking to avoid potentially wasting a couple of hours attempting to make it work in case it's futile or need some specific work on the Quarto end first)

[gordonwoodhull]

It’s not just a template, we also need some processing in the Quarto front-end to concatenate all the chapters into a book.

The way Quarto assembles a book, each chapter is rendered separately, and then the outputs are “concatenated” - but you can see that it’s not just pasting them together, the chapters have to be wrapped and put together in syntactically the right way.

If the performance of having all the chapters together in one document is okay for your project (e.g. including the chapters via shortcodes into a book document, not a book project), you could probably adapt a Typst book template today. But if you want the separate rendering of chapters, you’ll probably need to wait until it’s implemented in Quarto.

[roaldarbol]

Thanks for the reply! I might just make an attempt. I've made one for MyST Markdown, which I presume would just need to be adapted, but I'll see. Given the popularity of Typst, I'm really looking forward to Quarto supporting Typst books. :-)

[rainer-rq-koelle]

This would be a useful application for our use of R, Quarto, ... and now typst. @roaldarbol could you share your experience or template. I would love to make use of this.

[roaldarbol]

@rainer-rq-koelle I'm afraid I ended up exporting to LaTeX due to time-constraints. Maybe I'll find time eventually, but not soon.