Before I headed out to the Physics of Life conference, I had prepared a poster in $\LaTeX$ in which I really struggled. Although I am quite familiar with $\LaTeX$, it took me quite a while to achieve the results which I desired. I have already summarized many of my pain-points in a previous post. Coming from this conference and in preparation for the next presentation at the bwHPC Symposium, I started to migrate my work from $\LaTeX$ to typst. While the code only consisted of very little functionality in the beginning, more and more started to pile up over time. For the final poster at the bwHPC Symposium, I was able to completely use my typst solution.
peace-of-posters
The following sections describe my experience as I have worked on this project. The full documentation of the package is hosted at jonaspleyer.github.io/peace-of-posters/.
Documentation
The step from a working script to a package was rather small since I had already modularized much of
my code in order to reuse it.
However, documentation of said code was still a problem.
I was very much spoiled by solutions such as rustdoc which generate documentation directly from
source code.
However, since the typst ecosystem is rather young, there does not exist such a solution yet.
Instead I opted to use Hugo with which I was already familiar to create a
custom solution for documenting the code.
In particular, I wrote a partial which parses Hugo markdown and then automatically detects marked
types and inserts the corresponding objects in order to nicely visualize them (see documentation of
boxes.typ).
Usage
It is straightforward to construct new posters with this package. Simply take the peace-of-posters template and modify the contents and boxes to your liking. This can be done either via the command line
typst init @preview/peace-of-posters
or directly in the webapp. To see posters which have been created by me or other users visit the showcase section of the documentation.
Maintenance
The overall maintenance of peace-of-posters has been very smooth.
Some minor bugs have been brought forth and some users opened PRs in order to contribute to the
project.
I was very pleased with the overall interaction of the typst team.
Pushing new changes upstream via typst-packages has been very
straightforward.
The response time was fast.
The maintainers performed some high-level quality checking and support new contributors with any
question they might have.