TypstDocumentation

Advanced Styling

In the previous two chapters of this tutorial, you have learned how to write a document in Typst and how to change its formatting. The report you wrote throughout the last two chapters got a straight A and your supervisor wants to base a conference paper on it! The report will of course have to comply with the conference's style guide. Let's see how we can achieve that.

Before we start, let's create a team, invite your supervisor and add them to the team. You can do this by going back to the app dashboard with the four-circles icon in the top left corner of the editor. Then, choose the plus icon in the left toolbar and create a team. Finally, click on the new team and go to its settings by clicking 'manage team' next to the team name. Now you can invite your supervisor by email.

The team settings

Next, move your project into the team: Open it, going to its settings by choosing the gear icon in the left toolbar and selecting your new team from the owners dropdown. Don't forget to save your changes!

Now, your supervisor can also edit the project and you can both see the changes in real time. You can join our Discord server to find other users and try teams with them!

The conference guidelines

The layout guidelines are available on the conference website. Let's take a look at them:

We already know how to do many of these things, but for some of them, we'll need to learn some new tricks.

Writing the right set rules

Let's start by writing some set rules for the document.

#set page(
  paper: "us-letter",
  header: align(right)[
    A fluid dynamic model for
    glacier flow
  ],
  numbering: "1",
)
#set par(justify: true)
#set text(
  font: "Linux Libertine",
  size: 11pt,
)

#lorem(600)
Preview

You are already familiar with most of what is going on here. We set the text size to 11pt and the font to Linux Libertine. We also enable paragraph justification and set the page size to US letter.

The header argument is new: With it, we can provide content to fill the top margin of every page. In the header, we specify our paper's title as requested by the conference style guide. We use the align function to align the text to the right.

Last but not least is the numbering argument. Here, we can provide a numbering pattern that defines how to number the pages. By setting into to "1", Typst only displays the bare page number. Setting it to "(1/1)" would have displayed the current page and total number of pages surrounded by parentheses. And we could even have provided a completely custom function here to format things to our liking.

Creating a title and abstract

Now, let's add a title and an abstract. We'll start with the title. We center align it and increase its font weight by enclosing it in *stars*.

#align(center, text(17pt)[
  *A fluid dynamic model
  for glacier flow*
])
Preview

This looks right. We used the text function to override the previous text set rule locally, increasing the size to 17pt for the function's argument. Let's also add the author list: Since we are writing this paper together with our supervisor, we'll add our own and their name.

#grid(
  columns: (1fr, 1fr),
  align(center)[
    Therese Tungsten \
    Artos Institute \
    #link("mailto:tung@artos.edu")
  ],
  align(center)[
    Dr. John Doe \
    Artos Institute \
    #link("mailto:doe@artos.edu")
  ]
)
Preview

The two author blocks are laid out next to each other. We use the grid function to create this layout. With a grid, we can control exactly how large each column is and which content goes into which cell. The columns argument takes an array of relative lengths or fractions. In this case, we passed it two equal fractional sizes, telling it to split the available space into two equal columns. We then passed two content arguments to the grid function. The first with our own details, and the second with our supervisors'. We again use the align function to center the content within the column. The grid takes an arbitrary number of content arguments specifying the cells. Rows are added automatically, but they can also be manually sized with the rows argument.

Now, let's add the abstract. Remember that the conference wants the abstract to be set ragged and centered.

...

#align(center)[
  #set par(justify: false)
  *Abstract* \
  #lorem(80)
]
Preview

Well done! One notable thing is that we used a set rule within the content argument of align to turn off justification for the abstract. This does not affect the remainder of the document even though it was specified after the first set rule because content blocks scope styling. Anything set within a content block will only affect the content within that block.

Another tweak could be to save the paper title in a variable, so that we do not have to type it twice, for header and title. We can do that with the let keyword:

#let title = [
  A fluid dynamic model
  for glacier flow
]

...

#set page(
  header: align(
    right + horizon,
    title
  ),
  ...
)

#align(center, text(17pt)[
  *#title*
])

...
Preview

After we bound the content to the title variable, we can use it in functions and also within markup (prefixed by #, like functions). This way, if we decide on another title, we can easily change it in one place.

Adding columns and headings

The paper above unfortunately looks like a wall of lead. To fix that, let's add some headings and switch our paper to a two-column layout. The columns function takes a number and content, and layouts the content into the specified number of columns. Since we want everything after the abstract to be in two columns, we need to apply the column function to our whole document.

Instead of wrapping the whole document in a giant function call, we can use an "everything" show rule. To write such a show rule, put a colon directly behind the show keyword and then provide a function. This function is given the rest of the document as a parameter. We have called the parameter rest here, but you are free to choose any name. The function can then do anything with this content. In our case, it passes it on to the columns function.

...

#show: rest => columns(2, rest)

= Introduction
#lorem(300)

= Related Work
#lorem(200)
Preview

Now there is only one thing left to do: Style our headings. We need to make them centered and use small capitals. Because the heading function does not offer a way to set any of that, we need to write our own heading show rule.

#show heading: it => [
  #set align(center)
  #set text(12pt, weight: "regular")
  #block(smallcaps(it.body))
]

...
Preview

This looks great! We used a show rule that applies to all headings. We give it a function that gets passed the heading as a parameter. That parameter can be used as content but it also has some fields like title, numbers, and level from which we can compose a custom look. Here, we are center-aligning, setting the font weight to "regular" because headings are bold by default, and use the smallcaps function to render the heading's title in small capitals.

The only remaining problem is that all headings look the same now. The "Motivation" and "Problem Statement" subsections ought to be italic run in headers, but right now, they look indistinguishable from the section headings. We can fix that by using a where selector on our set rule: This is a method we can call on headings (and other elements) that allows us to filter them by their level. We can use it to differentiate between section and subsection headings:

#show heading.where(
  level: 1
): it => block(width: 100%)[
  #set align(center)
  #set text(12pt, weight: "regular")
  #smallcaps(it.body)
]

#show heading.where(
  level: 2
): it => text(
  size: 11pt,
  weight: "regular",
  style: "italic",
  it.body + [.],
)
Preview

This looks great! We wrote two show rules that each selectively apply to the first and second level headings. We used a where selector to filter the headings by their level. We then rendered the subsection headings as run-ins. We also automatically add a period to the end of the subsection headings.

Let's review the conference's style guide:

We are now in compliance with all of these styles and can submit the paper to the conference! The finished paper looks like this:

The finished paper

Review

You have now learned how to create headers and footers, how to use functions and scopes to locally override styles, how to create more complex layouts with the grid function and how to write show rules for individual functions, and the whole document. You also learned how to use the where selector to filter the headings by their level.

The paper was a great success! You've met a lot of like-minded researchers at the conference and are planning a project which you hope to publish at the same venue next year. You'll need to write a new paper using the same style guide though, so maybe now you want to create a time-saving template for you and your team?

In the next section, we will learn how to create templates that can be reused in multiple documents. This is a more advanced topic, so feel free to come back to it later if you don't feel up to it right now.