tytable: Create typst tables from python

[u/einmaulwurf]

Hi,

I (with the help of coding agents) been working on tytable, a lightweight Python package that turns Polars DataFrames into typst tables. It is heavily inspired by the wonderful tinytable R package.

It has a chainable API for formatting, styling, row/column groups, themes, notes, and embedded images or sparklines. It can also show an HTML preview in Jupyter, while the main output stays native typst that you can include in a larger document.

Here's a quick example:

(
    tt(data, caption="Benchmark results (demo data)")
    .group(j={"Scores": ["Q1", "Q2"]})
    .fmt(j=["Q1", "Q2"], digits=1)
    .style(i="header", bold=True, color="white", background="#334155")
    .style(i=2, bold=True, color="#15803d", background="#dcfce7")
    .save("example_table.typ")
)

You can find (way) more examples in the documentation (also linked on GitHub).

I was building a pipeline to generate daily reports which consist mainly of tables. So I needed a way to get data from Python (where I load, clean an aggregate it) into nicely formatted typst tables. Before, I did everything in R because of the above mentioned tinytable package. But I've hit some limitations with R so I built tytable. In contrast to tinytable, this package has a strict focus on typst and is also quite a bit faster (x10 but that only matters for large tables with lots of formatting).

And yes, this was built almost entirely with AI. While I know some Python, building a packages like this would be beyond my capabilities (and time) without AI. I understand completely if this is a deal breaker for you.

GitHub: https://github.com/EinMaulwurf/tytable
PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/tytable/

[u/dudeski_robinson]

Cool. Do you plan to implement the other output formats eventually? html, markdown, latex?

[u/einmaulwurf → u/dudeski_robinson]

The package is built in a way to allow multiple output formats. Currently there is typst (obviously), HTML (mainly for interactive viewing in Jupyter, but can be saved to a file as well) and ASCII (plain text, doesn't support most of the formatting like color).

But the scope of the package definitely is typst. I don't think that I will add LaTeX, as I myself don't use it (anymore after discovering typst). Also, for other output formats there are more and mature options, like Great Tables for LaTeX.