I came across typst recently which looks like an interesting replacement to LaTeX. I don’t really do much collaborative editing anymore, but I really enjoy plain text presentations. I tried pollen as well, but I didn’t like the unicode symbols. What was my first presentation like using typst?

typst is available on the unstable nix channel and you can likely get it with nix-shell -p typst or follow the instructions on their github.

One annoying thing about LaTeX is you have to compile a bunch of times for your PDF to be correct. With typst, you can typst -w document.typ and it will watch the document for changes and recompile automatically. This is a really nice productivity boost.

Setting up the presentation,

#set page(                                                                 
  paper: "presentation-16-9",    
  margin: (    
    rest: 25pt    
  )    
)

Here, we are setting parameters for the page. # denotes a “code expression”. I believe I could also build my own template to define margins, spacing, font, etc. in a separate file.

Next, the font,

#set text(    
  font: "JetBrains Mono",    
  size: 22pt    
)

This syntax is a bit odd, but it is syntax and LaTeX isn’t necessarily nicer in any way. You can lay out a slide like so,

= The slides title

// The slides content

#pagebreak()

The = denotes a header, you can generate smaller headers with additional =, i.e. ===. The // denotes a comment, most of what you need is from markdown, see the syntax guide. Interestingly, you can make this into a named function,

let slide(title, content) = [
  = #title
  #content
  #pagebreak()
]

The function syntax is a bit weird to me, but I also don’t fully understand the type system yet. As an example, here is another function,

  #let fig(location, width, gap, caption) = [
    #figure(
      image(location, width: width),
      numbering: none,
      gap: gap,
      caption: caption
    )
  ]

Note the difference in how I refer to the parameters in the body. I think the former #x are inserting “content blocks” and the latter are plain values and don’t require the #. Not exactly sure yet.

From here, you could generate a slide with a figure pretty easy.

#slide(
  [The slides title],
  [
    - Some unordered list item
    - Some other unordered list item
    fig(
      "figures/image.png", 
      350pt, // the width of the image, see function definition
      -2pt, // the captions are a bit far away from the images by default
      [ The caption for the figure. ]
    )
  ]
)

From here, you can build a basic presentation! Pretty cool.

I also wrote two other functions for links:

#let l(location) = link(location)[#text(blue)[#location]]
#let ld(location, description) = link(location)[#text(blue)[#description]]

I did try a two column #grid but the alignment was a bit wonky. I would like to spend a bit more time handling columnar layouts before attempting to show some code. Let me know what you think on Twitter