What is subpar?
Subpar is a package which enables you to create figures containing other figures, i.e. sub figures.
Why a new maintainer?
I maintain a few other projects and want to reduce the workload I put on myself in my free time. Most of my time goes into typst-test (soon to be renamed) and I need some code-free time too.
I’d like to try maintaining it, what would I need to do?
Maintaining the package would mean writing documentation, fixing bugs and potentially implementing new features, the scope depends on you, but the first two are important I believe.
There are some caveats:
Because I wanted the package to be setup-free (i.e. no show-rule required, just import it and use it), it is in a pretty rough state. The internal code is hard to read and uses some hacks to work around Typst’s current limitations. Much of this is undocumented and not very well organized.
Fortunately, creating sub figures is actually simpler than expected if one removes the setup-free restriction, the additional cognitive load of adding a show rule at the top of the document a user is compiling is negligible anyway.
This means that most of the internal complexity could be removed by simply designing it from scratch with a setup show-rule in mind. Things like setting up reference show rules, recreating figure layouts in a grid more elaborately for proper alignments, etc., could be done in this rule while keeping the code cleaner and easier to maintain.
If you feel like you got time on your hands for maintenance, feel free to reach out to me:
- you can answer to this post or DM me right here,
- you can DM me on discord, my username is
tinger, but I don’t answer random friend requests if we don’t have servers in common, so you should joint the community discord first, - or you can email me at
tinger@tinger.dev.
Are there any alternatives?
I think the best alternative is to make it easier in Typst to handle this out of the box, instead of having a package like subpar. I believe this is possible today without a lot of fundamental changes, but it still requires an experienced rust developer and some time and thinking to get right.
I depend on this package, does this mean my documents will break?
Maybe, it currently uses a few things that could later be deprecated, if these things are eventually removed you’d be blocked from updating to a new version of Typst. If other packages you need then require this new version as a minimum version, you’d have to chose which package is more important to you.
This is why I’m looking to the community for help, ideally this should never reach you as an end user.
For now, I’ll keep ownership and if I find no maintainer I’ll transfer it to typst-community such that it can be transferred later.