Improving Typst Web App on Mobile Devices

General
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I’ve been using the Typst Web App extensively on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, and I’ve noticed a few usability issues that could significantly improve the experience if addressed.

Preventing Unintentional Preview Rotation

Currently, when using touch gestures on a mobile device, the preview pane can be freely rotated. This seems to be triggered by a specific multi-touch input event. However, excessive rotation often causes the webpage to crash entirely. This makes zooming in precisely very difficult, as accidental rotations frequently occur.

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Would it be possible to identify which touch event is responsible and disable rotation? This would prevent instability and make interactions with the preview pane much more reliable.

I’ve recorded a video demonstrating the issue, which I’ll link here:

Allowing the Editor-Preview Split to Be Resized on Touch Devices

On desktop, dragging the divider between the editor and the preview allows users to resize both panes dynamically. However, on mobile devices, there’s no way to adjust the layout since it requires a mouse-based interaction.

It would be great if this functionality could be added for touch devices—perhaps by enabling a touch-and-drag event for the divider. This would make working on mobile much more flexible.

Considering a Touch-Friendly Context Menu (Feature Request)

On mobile devices, right-clicking isn’t possible. While not a critical issue, it would be a great quality-of-life improvement if a context menu could be accessed via long-press or a two-finger tap. This could allow for features like quick copying, inserting templates, or preview options, similar to how right-click works on desktop.

I believe many users would benefit from a more touch-friendly version of Typst, especially on tablets, which are becoming an increasingly popular tool for coding and writing.

Would love to hear your thoughts on these suggestions!

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We’d love to improve the mobile version, we just couldn’t justify prioritizing it so far. The rotation thing is interesting because it’s actually additional code that Martin wrote for fun a longer while ago that enables it in the first place. I have also observed crashes on iOS, but I’m not sure whether they are actually related to the rotation or to high zoom levels (which cause really larger renders due to high DPI on phones). The video you linked doesn’t play for me unfortunately.

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Thanks so much for the kind reply! Totally understandable that mobile hasn’t been a top priority so far—I can imagine there are plenty of other important things to focus on. Still, it would be awesome if these things could be considered at some point in the future. Especially on tablets, Typst already works quite well, and with a few tweaks it could be a really great mobile-first experience.

Out of curiosity: do you have any stats or general insights on which kinds of devices the Typst Web App is used on? Would be interesting to know how many people are already using it on mobile or tablet.

Thanks again for all your great work—really appreciate it!

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We see 3-4% on mobile, with most of those being phones rather than tablets.

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