Hello Typst community!
Would anyone be interested in to contribute report templates for open source plain text accounting tool called Tackler?
As I’m fairly new here, I will include only one link to additional information, and it’s at the end of this post.
Background
Tackler is plain text accounting tool, and it’s written in Rust. The idea of plain text accounting is that accounting journals (“books”) are kept as human readable and editable text files, and then those files are processed into (financial) reports.
The beauty of this concept is that you can account pretty much anything, and it doesn’t have to be financially related. For example, it could be time tracking of preparation work done for scientific paper.
Tackler has many cool features, for example integrated support to use Git SCM as direct, natively integrated data source (by Rust Gitoxide / Gix-crate), but it lacks beautiful (or in fact any kind of) PDF reports.
Currently all reports are text files at the moment.
PDF Reports by Typst
Typst looks really cool and promising technology, and the current idea is to use it and its data loading functionality to add PDF reporting into tackler.
This could be done either as embedded typst library or Typst as a separate binary in the processing pipeline.
The idea is also, that this way users could tailor the reports with their own templates.
I have some experience with typesetting from the past (LaTeX, docbook, XSLT and XSL-FO (Apache FOP)), but I know very little about Typst. I’m also quite busy working with Tackler’s own backlog, so I was wondering if someone would be interested in to help and contribute basic report template(s) for Tackler? That would be very much appreciated.
The resulting report templates and user documentation for those could also serve as an example for Typst of data loading capabilities (beeing fully working example). The awesome Typst repository seems not to have any JSON data loading examples at the moment, or has it? So these templates could also be useful for Typst Community.
Additional Information and Documentation
There is very rudimentary, proof-of-concept typst report in the repository: report-bal.typ
Tackler repository (Github: tackler-ng/tackler) and website has much more information - there are links all over the place in the repository’s readme.
Thanks for reading this far - any feedback or ideas are warmly welcomed! I would very much like to hear any opinions if this approach makes sense (and especially if it doesn’t!).