Can I access the dimensions of a page?

[Brenden_Harrell]

Hi Everyone,

I have made the bookletic package that splits the page into two smaller ones for ordering as a booklet. And right now I have the overall page size hardcoded so that I can divide it and set the size for the smaller pages but am trying to find a way to use the built in page sizes. Is there a way to ask the user of a function for a page size and use that within a function to get the actual dimensions of a type of paper?

[quachpas]

Hello!
You can access page size using the layout function.
From the official documentation:

#layout(size => {
  let half = 50% * size.width
  [Half a page is #half wide.]
})

[laurmaedje]

To supplement the previous answer: While layout generally gives the dimensions of the currently surrounding container, page.width and page.height give the page height/width specifically. They are only available within context.

#set page(width: 500pt)
#context page.width

However, page.width will always have the value of width, not of height when flipped: true. Moreover, as of Typst 0.11.1 the retrieval does not work when using an explicit #page(width: ..)[..]. This will be fixed in Typst 0.12.

If it’s for a smaller piece of layout, the layout approach would be more robust in this regard. However, it comes at the cost of all the content within it being wrapped in a block-level container, so you can’t e.g. have pagebreaks within it and it can negatively affect layout of things like footnotes.

[Brenden_Harrell]

I have tried the context approach but have not been able to assign the value to a variable for use throughout the rest of the code. When I assign it like this:
let variable = context page.width

The variable ends up having the context function itself assigned rather than the actual value. Am I missing something or is this a bug?

[ensko]

See here:

Why is the value I receive from context always content?

When working with context, you need to put everything that depends on the contextual information into the context block/expression itself. The explicit context expression is a trade-off: You get to know where in the document you are (accessible via here()) and which set rules are active there (accessible via things like text.lang). In return, the context value itself becomes opaque. You cannot peek into it, so everything that depends on the contextual information must happen within it. Let’s lo…

[Brenden_Harrell]

Thank you! That works! This is the structure that ended up working for others who might need it:

#let sig (/*arguments*/) => {
//Initialize stuff
  context {
    let signature-paper-height = page.height
    //Rest of package that uses value here
  }
}

[Jon]

I would like to access the width of the page to calculate the minimum of page width or a given length so that I can make a table that will fit on one page.

The only way to accomplish this is by wrapping the table in a context and then further wrapping the context in a function, and then calling that function? That seems less than ideal.

[sijo]

Hi @Jon, welcome to the Typst forum! Please make a new post for your question. Also please clarify if you want to use the full page width, or only the width of the text area (without margins).