I'm also building a blog with Typst, but I don't use the html export or the typst binary at all.
Instead I only use it as a markup language and use the typst libraries to evaluate it into blocks/AST which I then use together with askama templates.
This gives me a lot more flexibility, and typst is nicely extensible with custom typesafe functions. The downside is that existing LSP integrations don't recognize my custom keywords and show errors, something I just accept for now but might work around by importing a lib.ty stub (without real implementation, just matching signatures).
Rochus 1 days ago [-]
Cool idea. So you essentially only use the Typst parser (i.e. the generated AST, I assume the text format of it)? With askama templates you essentially implement your own Typst renderer, which sounds like quite an achievement. May I assume that only a subset of Typst is supported by your renderer? What is the advantage of all this effort compared to e.g. Markdown or Asciidoc?
progbits 7 hours ago [-]
Not just parser but the evaluator API (so imports, macros etc all work). You get back the AST as typed structs including own custom element types.
It's a different set, not subset. I don't support some math and layout things that don't make sense on a webblog (or which I don't need). But I have custom elements for margin notes and such which typst doesn't have out of the box.
I don't like markdown - it's underspecified, typos turn into broken docs instead of compilation error and extending it is hard. I looked at rST which is close to what I want and what I would have used if I didn't find Typst, I just prefer the latter's syntax and also it's a rust library I can more easily work with.
Edit: also I'm not saying this is better or anything, it's just fun for me to build.
Rochus 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds interesting. Have you published your generator somewhere? I don't understand yet what you exactly do with the askama templates (the result is Rust code, isn't it?).
shakna 2 days ago [-]
The HTML target being unstable, meaning I can't really build a half-decent ePub target from it, is probably the key blocker for me strongly considering Typst for my workflow.
For now, it's an unhappy marriage of pandoc, LaTeX, and a 20k LOC Lua ecosystem for me.
Rendered at 20:24:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Instead I only use it as a markup language and use the typst libraries to evaluate it into blocks/AST which I then use together with askama templates.
This gives me a lot more flexibility, and typst is nicely extensible with custom typesafe functions. The downside is that existing LSP integrations don't recognize my custom keywords and show errors, something I just accept for now but might work around by importing a lib.ty stub (without real implementation, just matching signatures).
This is actually very little work to set up, have a look at: https://github.com/Relacibo/typst-as-lib (not my code, just something I found helpful)
It's a different set, not subset. I don't support some math and layout things that don't make sense on a webblog (or which I don't need). But I have custom elements for margin notes and such which typst doesn't have out of the box.
I don't like markdown - it's underspecified, typos turn into broken docs instead of compilation error and extending it is hard. I looked at rST which is close to what I want and what I would have used if I didn't find Typst, I just prefer the latter's syntax and also it's a rust library I can more easily work with.
Edit: also I'm not saying this is better or anything, it's just fun for me to build.
For now, it's an unhappy marriage of pandoc, LaTeX, and a 20k LOC Lua ecosystem for me.