Why does this blog post use cat instead of opening the file from typst code?

[Christian1]

Typst: Automated PDF Generation with Typst – Typst Blog

Basically why does this do

 --input customer="$(cat mike.json)"

instead of passing the file name and processing the file from Typst?

[ian]

I didn’t write the post, so I can’t say for certain, but one reason might be flexibility. If the input is a file name, then you always have to have your customer JSON stored in a file. But if you want to test the script when developing it or if you want to produce a document for a single customer once, then it may be easier to just pass in the customer JSON directly at the command line.