Typst Books, Article Layout, and typst-gather

Typst is a lightning-fast typesetting system that provides a modern alternative to LaTeX.

The Typst ecosystem is thriving, and Quarto 1.9 brings Typst much closer to feature parity with LaTeX:

Typst books
Article layout in Typst
Bundling of Typst packages for offline rendering

Typst books

In Quarto 1.9, a project with type book and format typst is now rendered as a single document with multiple chapters and other book content.

_quarto.yml

project:
  type: book

book:
  title: "My Book"
  author: "Jane Doe"
  chapters:
    - index.qmd
    - intro.qmd
    - summary.qmd

format: typst

A Typst book rendered with the orange-book extension, showing the part one page with a colored background and table of contents — Part page

A Typst book rendered with the orange-book extension, showing the chapter one page with colored headers and sidebar navigation — Chapter page

A Typst book rendered with the orange-book extension, showing the second page from chapter one with colored headers and sidebar navigation — Chapter content

A Typst book rendered with the orange-book extension, showing the chapter two page with colored headers and sidebar navigation — Next chapter

All book features previously available in the LaTeX format are now available in Typst:

Parts and Chapters
Appendices
Cross-references and chapter-based numbering
Table of Contents

List-of-Figures and List-of-Tables support is coming soon.

The default Typst book uses the bundled Quarto quarto-orange-book extension, which uses typst-gather to bundle the Typst orange-book package. Orange-book provides a textbook-style layout with colored chapter headers and sidebars.

The orange-book extension supports brand.yml customization — it uses the primary color for chapter headers and sidebars, and the medium logo on the title page. The screenshots above were generated with this _brand.yml:

_brand.yml

color:
  primary: "#F36619"
  secondary: "#2E86AB"

logo:
  images:
    test-logo:
      path: logo.svg
      alt: "Test Logo"
  medium: test-logo

Since Typst books are implemented as Quarto Format Extensions, you can customize the appearance by creating your own extension. Typst partials define the overall book structure, while Lua filters handle the necessary AST transformations.

Article layout in Typst

Also in Quarto 1.9, all Article Layout features now work in Typst, via the Typst Marginalia package.

Specifically:

Figures, tables, code listings, and equations can be placed in the margin using the .column-margin class or the column: margin code cell option.
You can also target specific output types with fig-column: margin or tbl-column: margin.
Figure, table, and code listing captions can be placed in the margin with cap-location: margin (or fig-cap-location: margin and tbl-cap-location: margin for specific types).
Footnotes and citations can be displayed in the margin with reference-location: margin and citation-location: margin. When margin citations are enabled, the bibliography is suppressed.
Asides (.aside class) place content in the margin without a footnote number.

A page of a Typst article with a margin note and a margin figure using the Marginalia package — Margin note and figure

A page of a Typst article using margin captions — Margin captions

A page of a Typst article using margin references — Margin references

Books with article layout are functional, but need work

You can combine book and article layout, but there are some layout quirks when combining the two. We’ll work with the orange-book author to integrate Marginalia into the book template.

`typst-gather`

Quarto 1.9 automatically stages Typst packages — from your extensions, from Quarto’s bundled extensions, and from Quarto itself — into the .quarto/ cache directory before calling typst compile. This means Typst documents render offline without needing network access.

To make this work, extension authors use the new typst-gather tool, which scans their .typ files for @preview imports and downloads the packages into the extension directory. Authors run quarto call typst-gather and commit the results — users of the extension don’t need to do anything.

This means Custom Typst Formats can depend on Typst packages without copying and pasting Typst code, making them simpler and easier to maintain.

Both Typst books and article layout are built on typst-gather — orange-book depends on the Typst orange-book package, and article layout depends on Marginalia. As the Typst package ecosystem grows, we’re excited to see what the community builds with Typst packages.