What is the best way to typeset legal norms?

[Xodarap]

So, recently I am working with some legal norms and need to write or publish some myself. These include ‘(Vereins)satzungen’ und ‘Verordnungen’ in German law system (i think the english terms are: 'statute, ‘charter’ and ‘constitution’ and ‘act’, ‘ordinance’ and ‘regulation’).

However, i would like to use typst to typeset some of these and i wonder how i can reliably typeset paragraph numbers, and sentence numbering. Here is an example:

PS: as you can see the current formatting is less than ideal. e.g. why are there bullet points???)

[Xodarap]

I have a somewhat working example here:
https://typst.app/project/RgpXazQvZNkkDyOMvUd8jM

(I would still need to implement some kind of check if there is only one paragraph or one sentence. In these cases the number is usually left out in law texts.)

However, its somewhat cumbersome to use. For every article one needs to call the article(name, ..paragraphs) function. and every paragraph is a list of content blocks. That is not what I imagined i nterms of usability - especially if i want to work with other, less technical people together on this.

Is there a better way to conceptualize articles? is there a better way to count/number paragraphs? Is there a better way to count/number sentences?

Actually i thought some people would have developed packages for this already, but i couldn’t find any on the universe.

[hpcfzl]

I appreciate you taking the time to explain what you have tried.

Indeed, there’s an existing package for this when searching with the keyword law:

delegis – Typst Universe

Unfortunately this package doesn’t automate the numbering.

Let us know whether that is enough to satisfy your needs. Additionally:

• The best solution to this in the future will probably be par.line(numbering: ...). At this point, I don’t think it’s that feasible really.
• Instead of thinking of these paragraphs as par, why not enum or terms? As seen in delegis screenshots, there can obviously be multiple levels which is something to be wary of:
  • These kinds of paragraphs use the combination of counter from enum and the hanging-indent from terms. I’m not certain what’s best for that. At its core, this post is a separate issue of its own, so I recommend you follow @vmartel08’s link at Hanging-indent for lists · Issue #5751 · typst/typst · GitHub or use a package like itemize.

[akoller]

What do you think of this solution, which uses Typst sections for legal sections, level-1 enums for numbered paragraphs, and level-2 enums for numbered sentences?

https://typst.app/project/rGC9SCKI8GJsiSDXhFPZnw