Touying: Call for Feature Requests, Suggestions and Issue Reports

General
1

Welcome dear Touying Users,

with Touying v0.8.0 now out, we have some time before the next version will arrive.

As some of you may not be technically people and thus would not give feedback on Github (either on the Issues or Discussions page), I want to call for suggestions, bugs and more here as well.

If you feel like Touying is missing something, is weird in some way or could be improved in another please leave your answer either on github or directly here.

Now before all of you write out the same things here is what is planned:

  • Style Customizations and Consistent Color Handling and Containers (see mosaic for inspiration)
  • easier custom themes: there was an existing branch some time ago but not sure it will come out like that
  • item-by-item-fn fix: making the marker consistent in style
  • better slide markers (<unnumbered>, <never>, …): not sure what this will entail

If you have opinions, however strong, regarding any of these, please leave them here or on github as well.

The styling is the biggest open item touying still needs to address in my opinion to feel somewhat finished. Colors feel very rigid, users cannot easily change them. While we do have the `config-colors` group they are not consistently used and you cannot expect consistent behaviour across themes right now. Of course this is mainly due to themes being custom but even the builtin themes are not really customizable. And then there is layout customization: a large part of what makes typst so nice, and which touying makes hard for you.

What a syntax like mosaic uses (potentially with selectors instead of labels directly) could enable, is however way more than just colour handling. Also general layout behaviour via show/set rules. For that the touying layout components need to be structured well so you get what you expect. Ofc it won’t feel like native typst until there are custom types but we can get pretty close even without. How this will affect the touying config and the current abilities via e.g. `touying-set-config` or the config you can pass in to the slide is to be seen. We will keep backwards compatibility as much as possible as long as it feels right.
As we would like to allow compatibility with themes, this might bring some changes on that front as well.

Don’t expect the next major update until some time, unless new motivated contributors fall out of the sky.
Until then we will mainly bug fix, and there may be some random features here and there.

Please continue using this forum as usual, this post is not meant for general questions regarding touying.

Thank you for using Touying :)

PS: when typst html is finally stable we might also consider adding native html support, but since javascript allows so many capabilities like actual smooth animations this will likely take a while until it will mature and will start out pretty static. We may also need to rethink some core choices of touying to keep it user friendly for both outputs.

5 Likes
2

In my use of the package so far, a small thing that has come up several times is the need to start a new slide with no title. --- starts a slide but keeps the previous title, and #empty-slide removes the footer:

#import "@preview/touying:0.8.0": *
#import themes.simple: *
#show: simple-theme.with(aspect-ratio: "4-3")

== Slide 1

This is slide 1.

---

This is still slide 1.

#empty-slide[
  This is slide 2, but no footer.
]

#slide(config: config-common(subslide-preamble: none))[
  This is slide 3.
]

The last one works, but something simpler (as simple as ---) would be great.

Maybe it’s a simple-theme issue, not a Touying issue?

3

so you basically want a slide that continues but is counted separately?
you can achieve that by adding a #v(100%) this breaks the following content onto the next page without touying noticing that you requested a new slide.

this content will still belong to the previous slide though and we don’t fully support that rn, e.g. in show-only-notes mode.

but i honestly think this is an antipattern (perhaps still better than using animations to replace the entire content) and either you should restructure your content or the way you write slides. but ofc do whatever works for you.

4

#v(100%) seems to be working well (I was afraid that wouldn’t update the slide number, but it does). As for the pattern, this is really something I use a lot: a title introduces a “thing” and that “thing” is discussed over the next 3 slides. I think my audience is smart enough to know it’s the same “thing” without having to repeat the title on each slide. (I was actually surprised that --- didn’t do what I needed; I feel like repeating the title, like keeping the outline visible, is a matter of preference, but I didn’t expect it to be the default.)