Colophon audits your manuscript as actually composed — word count (total and per section), reading time, page count, a figure/table inventory, labels never referenced, bibliography entries never cited — in a companion PDF, produced from the same compile as the manuscript itself. Unlike its sibling packages, it needs no per-passage markup: no check(), no passage() — an auditor, not an annotator.

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The problem

“How many words is this?”, “does this figure have a caption?”, “did I ever reference that equation I labelled?” — answered today by opening a PDF and counting, or by trusting whatever a word processor’s own status bar says about a completely different source format. None of it reflects the real, composed document: a word count taken from source text is wrong the moment a citation resolves into a bracketed number, and a page count doesn’t exist at all until the document has actually been laid out.

This works because Typst’s experimental bundle export lets a single compile produce several documents that share one introspection space — the audit is a genuinely separate document, built in the very same compile that laid the manuscript out, not a second tool run afterward against a stale copy.

Key features

• Word count, total and by section — word-counts-by-section buckets prose by heading, with the reference/citation machinery already stripped out (a resolved citation’s own bracketed number is never counted as a word). Excludes table cells and, by default, figure captions (count-captions: true to opt them in).
• Works through @preview/palimpsest’s own marks. add/del/rep/passage all render through a context block, even in clean mode — colophon reads their own metadata directly instead, so the word count matches exactly what the clean, submitted manuscript shows: the added text counted, the deleted text not, the replacement’s new wording only.
• An abstract, counted on its own. abstract(body) — an invisible marker, placed once, wherever you already write your abstract (a template’s own abstract: parameter, or a section in the manuscript) — reports its word count separately, excluded from the body total, since it’s routinely capped by its own, independent limit.
• A figure/table inventory with the real numbering. Kind, caption, and real page for every figure and table — the displayed number comes from ref(...), the same mechanism that already prints it correctly in the manuscript, so it’s right even for a template with its own exotic numbering scheme (by section, roman numerals, …), not recomputed by hand.
• Labels never referenced, and bibliography entries never cited. Every labelled heading/figure/equation with no ref anywhere in the bundle; every .bib entry (given a root-relative path) that no @key in the manuscript ever cites.
• Reports facts, never enforces them. No per-journal word or page limits, no strict/diagnostic machinery — an orphan label or an unused reference is often deliberate, so colophon lists it and leaves the judgment to you.

Installation

Import the package, plus contexture — the small, package-agnostic dependency that actually assembles the bundle compile (colophon itself never calls Typst’s own document(...)):

#import "@preview/colophon:0.1.0": *
#import "@preview/contexture:0.1.0": bundle

Requires Typst 0.15 or later, specifically its --features bundle export (still experimental — Typst prints a warning about this on every compile, which is expected).

Quick start

#import "@preview/colophon:0.1.0": *
#import "@preview/contexture:0.1.0": bundle

#show: bundle.with(
  template: instrument(template: my-journal-template),
  documents: (report(),),
)

#include "manuscript.typ"

typst compile --features bundle --format bundle main.typ

produces manuscript.pdf — completely unaffected, since nothing here touches the manuscript’s own rendering — and audit.pdf, the report. instrument(...) is the one wrapping step this package asks for: it lets report() find the manuscript’s real page span, and (for the word count) its content before layout, where a citation is still a real, ignorable reference rather than a rendered bracket.

Counting an abstract separately, and flagging never-cited references, both need one more small, deliberate step each:

#let my-template = some-journal-template.with(
  abstract: abstract(lorem(150)),   // wrap wherever you already write it
  // ...other template args unchanged
)

#show: bundle.with(
  template: instrument(template: my-template),
  documents: (report(bib: "/manuscript.bib"),),
)

Documentation

No docs/manual.typ yet — in the meantime, lib.typ and each src/*.typ file carry full doc comments, and tests/ has one focused example per feature (word counts, a figure/table inventory, orphan labels and uncited references, a real Typst Universe template, combining with @preview/palimpsest and @preview/checkitoff in the same bundle).

Examples

Two complete, working projects live under examples/ — the same two full-length fake articles @preview/palimpsest uses for its own examples (ivana-snackwell-grade mock studies, not toy manuscripts), each with colophon added alongside palimpsest’s own reviewer letter:

• fridge-study/ — against @preview/unequivocal-ams, with real figures built from @preview/lilaq. (⇒ pdf: manuscript, response, audit)
• emoji-email/ — against @preview/charged-ieee’s two-column layout, same real-figure treatment. (⇒ pdf: manuscript, response, audit)

Part of the contexture ecosystem

Built on @preview/contexture, the small shared engine behind every multi-document compile in this ecosystem. Combines cleanly with:

• @preview/palimpsest — manuscript revisions and a reviewer response letter that cites the real pages.
• @preview/checkitoff — reporting-guideline checklists (CONSORT, PRISMA, SPIRIT, STARD, STROBE) filled in with the real pages.

License

MIT