Hello, I’m trying to figure out a way to streamline my article writing process.
First requirement is that I need a collaborative tool for typst writing, typst.app is perfect in that regard.
Second, I need an easy way to integrate computation results in the article, quarto used to be the goto for such issues and it still is but the typst integration is not practical at all. Quarto’s typst integration only allows for periodic typst blocs. The qmd file is still quarto-markdown. I can’t have a typst-only file in quarto… Most problematic is the fact that quarto goto math renderer is latex, ie $$ only accepts latex expressions and not typst.
So my question is: how can I integrate my jupyter notebooks (or any other computation tool for python) with typst.app without having to have the jupyter notebook in a separate environment and to upload the figures each time I need to change something in the notebook (like quarto’s embeds) ?
Hi, welcome to the forum! I’ve changed the post category and edited the title to follow our guidelines. Feel free to edit it again if I got it wrong.
Regarding your question: I’m working on the first release of a Typst package to read Jupyter notebooks. The goal is to provide functions to easily include notebook content (code blocks, plots, also markdown to some extent) in a Typst document. I’m not sure that’s what you need since you would still have to upload the notebook to typst.app each time you change it. But if you’re interested I can send you a pre-release and you can tell me how it works for you. I would certainly be interested in some feedback before the release
Sure, I’d be very much interested in such a project of yours. As you said though, it will not be able to fullfill my collaborative requirement. I’m wondering how other people have fixed this issue ? Do they all give up on their collaborative requirements ? Or are we all wasting time uploading figures from the computation to typst.app (same problem with overleaf) ?
I also saw typst people doing their computations and plotting directly in Typst. Though it seems like a good solution, it’s actually very limited. Typst langage cannot compare to any modern computation framework such as python’s numpy-scipy-pandas combo or R. Besides, I don’t think it’s a good idea to do the typesetting and the computation in the same language, these jobs are so different, it’s not elegant. One tool for one job as the saying goes.
To my knowledge, the Typst web app isn’t meant to be integrated with other tools. For programmatic control or integration with tools like Quarto, I’d say the local environment is more suitable (i.e., you run everything on your computer).
If you’d still like to keep that in sync with the web app, you could use the Git integration. That way you can work locally and then push your changes online once you’re done.
One tool for one job is indeed the right approach imo, but the Typst app is (at the moment) the wrong tool to achieve that. Like many web apps, it only supports what it was designed to do (or what integration plugins exist for – which is none for now, except for git but it’s not live collaborative). The underlying technology that makes integration of various tools possible even without explicit integrations is the file system, so for the time being a local installation is the best option if you need integrations.
Maybe you can find live collaboration extensions for VS Code; I think that direction is easier than trying to make integrations using the app.
For me collaborative editing usually comes at a later stage, once the data processing is mostly done. Of course there are still iterations where I want to change and reexecute a notebook, but not so much as a collaborative process. So it’s OK if I just have to reupload a notebook now and then during the text-writing phase, which is the intensely collaborative part where typst.app shines.
There are other projects (e.g. lecture notes) where I cycle more frequently between notebook and Typst, but I do this locally so I can get the real-time feedback in the Typst preview by just saving the notebook.
Of course it would be nice to have a platform that supports collaborative editing for Typst and notebooks. Like a merge of typst.app and Google Colab. I think for Quarto markdown they have something along these lines in Posit Cloud (formerly called RStudio Cloud)? See Real-time collaborative editing on RStudio Cloud - Posit but I haven’t tested it.
For Typst, maybe an option is to use Live Share in VS Code. It’s certainly more clunky than typst.app but maybe it works for both Typst code and notebooks? Again I have no experience with it, so I don’t know if it’s a realistic solution.
Is there any other example of solutions that provide collaborative editing for both computations and high-quality typesetting (not just notebooks)?
Ok, I found what best suited my needs: quarto in cocalc.
Cocalc provides a neat integration of quarto and jupyter notebook. Therefore I can work on the computation and the article in the same environment (leveraging quarto’s embeds). The problems are as follows:
cocalc is rather slow (for free users) and rather expensive otherwise
quarto’s embeds are not very versatile (you can’t even choose the size of the figure, need to enforce that through matpotlib…)
as mentionned, quarto’s integration of typst is non-usable since the default engine for $mathexpr$ is latex, so I’m stuck with latex…
I need this type of workflow because, as an electrical engineering student, we have 8h lab work on average per week and it’s much more efficient to write the results on the fly rather than waiting the end of the day. I’d rather spend my week-ends on something else .
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