I absolutely love Typst.
Especially as someone who’d been experimenting with new formats for a very long time. I’ve known about Typst for a long time but i only just now got into using it.
(I only wish Typst used LaTeX’s \ for code. It’s so easy to type from the keyword and it’s visually minimal. Whereas # is just more work to type. The PureScript language redid a whole multitude of infix functions precisely for keyboard writing efficiency and for something that’s invoked so frequently it should have been something that’s easy to type… But I digress.)
I would love to bring this to a broader audience. But the ecosystem support is limited. Right now I’m working on a proposal for a particular online university, I would love to mention Typst but there has to be broader ecosystem support outside the walled garden of a single platform.
Web based editors aren’t ideal for a multitude of reasons. My dev text editor isn’t comfortable when it comes to writing long form essays, papers and other such content.
Web based editors are especially problematic as someone who prefers the native ‘feel’ as do many apple users.
Text selection and overall text functionality is terrible on the web compared to what’s possible with native text rendering frameworks.
Here’s an example of an old project I hacked out using TextKit2 for rendering markdown:
github.com/SuperSwiftMarkup/SuperSwiftMarkdownPrototype
Notice how I was able to support full and uniform text selection across all richly formatted markdown block types including tables and moreover including multiline cursors.
TextKit2 is like a low level browser rendering engine with a lazy line by line rendering pipeline. It’s a very incredibly difficult framework to work with but the results are unparalleled.
This is very tentative, but I’d be curious if it’d be possible to support some level of richly formatted Typst documents within a native text editor. So you’d get the best of both worlds. This would probably involve a specially written compiler frontend that can emit a partially evaluated AST for formatting (as my markdown example uses internally, its also why it doesn’t yet support editing, too much work for a proof of concept since I’d have to move to a lossless AST.)
Any interest among the Typst community for collaboration / brainstorming or just spitballing such an idea?