Documentation

HTML

Typst’s HTML export is currently under active development. The feature is still very incomplete and only available for experimentation behind a feature flag. Do not use this feature for production use cases. In the CLI, you can experiment with HTML export by passing --features html or setting the TYPST_FEATURES environment variable to html. In the web app, HTML export is not available at this time. Visit the tracking issue to follow progress on HTML export and learn more about planned features.

HTML files describe a document structurally. The aim of Typst’s HTML export is to capture the structure of an input document and produce semantically rich HTML that retains this structure. The resulting HTML should be accessible, human-readable, and editable by hand and downstream tools.

PDF, PNG, and SVG export, in contrast, all produce visual representations of a fully-laid out document. This divergence in the formats’ intents means that Typst cannot simply produce perfect HTML for your existing Typst documents. It cannot always know what the best semantic HTML representation of your content is.

Instead, it gives you full control: You can check the current export format through the target function and when it is set to HTML, generate raw HTML elements. The primary intended use of these elements is in templates and show rules. This way, the document’s contents can be fully agnostic to the export target and content can be shared between PDF and HTML export.

In the html export format, Typst will output a single HTML file. You can also use Typst to create a website comprising multiple HTML documents and additional assets. Typst calls such a collection a bundle and supports this use case with the dedicated bundle target. Refer to its documentation to learn more. Note that both in the html and the bundle target, Typst will currently always emit a standalone HTML file. Support for emitting fragments that can be integrated into other HTML documents is planned for the future.

Typst currently does not output CSS style sheets, instead focussing on emitting semantic markup. You can of course write your own CSS styles and still benefit from sharing your content between PDF and HTML. For the future, we plan to give you the option of automatically emitting CSS, taking more of your existing set rules into account.

Exporting as HTML

Command Line

Pass --format html to the compile or watch subcommand or provide an output file name that ends with .html. Note that you must also pass --features html or set TYPST_FEATURES=html to enable this experimental export target.

When using typst watch, Typst will launch a live-reloading HTTP server. You can configure it as follows:

Web App

Not currently available.

HTML-specific functionality

Typst exposes HTML-specific functionality in the global html module. See below for the definitions it contains.

Definitions