Why does Quarto use a custom kind (e.g. "quarto-float-fig") in Typst?

[christopherkenny]

Description

When a figure or table is created in Quarto which will be compiled as Typst, the kind argument is set to "quarto-float-fig" or "quarto-float-tbl". When creating figures directly in Typst, these would normally be image or table, respectively. This difference leads to questions in Typst support forums, discords, etc (such as this one yesterday).

I'm sure there's a good reason for the choice, but I was wondering what the philosophy behind it is?

[cscheid]

I'm sure there's a good reason for the choice, but I was wondering what the philosophy behind it is?

It's possible that we could have arrived at a different design, but here are the constraints:

• We need to allow custom crossreference kinds
• We need the contents of Quarto floats to be arbitrary blocks: a "Table" might be an image (because it's too complicated to render properly otherwise), or a block of monospaced text (as in a summary table of a statistical analysis). The same concerns apply to "Figures", and to all other floats.
• We need our floats to have supplements configurable from YAML metadata

The design we have allowed for those features with what we thought was the minimum amount of complexity. With that said, we're nowhere near expert typst programmers. If there's a strong reason to make a change, and that change doesn't break backwards compatibility, we'd be happy to take it (our plates are pretty full in 2025 to work on this, unfortunately.)

[christopherkenny]

Thanks @cscheid. This is very informative. I don't think there's any strong reason to change the behavior, I was just interested in why it was set up this way. I appreciate the response!