Is there a way to see elements and containers?

Questions
,
1

For troubleshooting, it would be very helpful if I could see all the shapes and sizes of all the elements and containers in my document. Is there a way to do this?

For example, if I could add fill colours or borders to each element I could see how they fit together and nest. So far I cannot see a way to do this (showing outline for the page, one for the column, one for the paragraph, one for the bullet list, one for the bullet item, etc.).

I don’t mean I expect a single parameter that I can use to make everything show an outline. But as far as I can tell there’s no way to set a fill colour or border for a column, for example? I might be missing something.

I’m imagining something like:

image
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(specifically it would be helpful for understanding what’s going on with positioning, place, invisible blocks and suchlike in Can Typst detect the current column? - #7 by Hurtleberry but it seems generally useful)

1 Like
2

Definitely something like this is the first thing I usually use:

#set block(stroke: 0.2pt + blue)

then you see lots of block outlines (and it should not affect layout.

Then this more hacky trick can be used to “follow” columns, and also draw them the same way. It lets you know (the code places metadata) what the width of the column is and its location. (There are some quirks you could run into though.)

I just verified visually that this doesn’t change the layout. When inserting grids, blocks etc, you could of course happen to change the layout.

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#set page(columns: 2)

#let enable-follow-column = true
#show: doc => if not enable-follow-column {
  doc
} else {
  set block(stroke: 0.2pt + blue)
  show par: block.with(stroke: red)
  show: body => {
    grid(
      grid.header(layout(size => {
        let position = here().position()
        box(width: 1fr)
        [#metadata(size + position)<_column_header>]
      })),
      body
    )
  }
  doc
}

#lorem(3)

- A
- B
- C

#lorem(10)

#colbreak()
#lorem(25)
1 Like
3

Thanks! I’ll experiment a bit more.