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?

[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).

[ratnanil]

The lack of book support is currently quite a drawback. I'm teaching students to use quarto and explicitly want to circumvent latex, but this also means missing out on quarto projects.

For me, it's not entirely clear if the quarto team want's to develop a book template, or whether you are waiting for an official typst book template. If it's the latter, I'm not sure the typst team is aware of this (I had a chat with them).

Btw, there is a book template maintained by the typst team (wonderous-book).

[gordonwoodhull]

wonderous-book is a fiction book template.

I've been eyeing the Typst Orange Template, which looks more appropriate for technical publishing and seems to be actively maintained:

https://github.com/flavio20002/typst-orange-template

I can't promise when I will have time to try it, because we are a tiny team and we have a lot of other priorities, but it's something I'm strongly interested in.

It would be helpful to hear others' experience with the orange template or any others.

[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)

[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.

[ratnanil]

I have a Typst template with book-like features (title pages, TOC, numbering, etc.) and I'm trying to understand the "adapt a Typst book template" approach @gordonwoodhull mentioned. What exactly does this mean? Could you outline this idea a bit more?

I've experimented with a book-merge-filter.lua that concatenates chapters before Typst processing, but Quarto still throws "format is not supported by book projects" errors. Is there a way to make Quarto recognize a custom Typst format as book-compatible?

[cscheid]

Is there a way to make Quarto recognize a custom Typst format as book-compatible?

Not currently. A "book project" is a relatively special thing inside Quarto (because it needs to do, among other things, the kind of merging you're experimenting with yourself, and these are not really format-agnostic as currently implemented).

The implementation itself is at src/project/types/book/book.ts, but you'll see that it's really not setup well to support a new format.

[ratnanil]

Thank you very much for the clarification!