I’m curious, why doesn’t Typst use GPU rendering for 3D graphics? Could anyone provide some insights on this?
Typst is a typesetting engine and scripting language. It doesn’t do 3D graphics. There are a few packages that do.
Typst will probably never have builtin 3D graphics, since it’s pretty niche, not what Typst is for, and can be done fine by a WASM package.
3D plots are probably the only use case that Typst will ever consider. For this purpose modern CPUs are adequate, even under the overhead of a WASM JIT compiler.
I think it would be technically possible for Typst to give WASM modules access to WebGPU, but it won’t happen because it provides so little value to Typst.
It would be cool to have support for 3D PDF. These have interactive 3D files in them that you can rotate as you want. We used to have those at a previous workplace, but I have no idea how they did it though, I tried doing it in LaTeX, but failed to load a file (was able to load the viewport tho).
Anyway for engineering docs this is nice since you do not need to make 12 screenshots from all angles
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That’s an interesting and valid use case that I hadn’t thought about, but it’s an unrelated feature.
Unless I’m hugely misunderstanding how that works, you’re ‘just’ embedding a 3D model in the PDF which is rendered by the PDF viewer. OP was asking about 3D rendering in Typst, presumably outputting an image or drawing primitives.
Yes you are right, I read this too quickly.