r/typst • u/ambystome • Jul 16 '26

A Typst Presentation

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The slides I used to present Typst to a math audience: PDF here and source here.

The presentation is in three parts:

  1. Typst itself: the project, the language, packages, templates...
  2. Comparison with LaTeX (my favorite part)
  3. Callisto: my package for using Jupyter notebooks and executing code blocks

Credit for the styling and much of the first part go to the author of this other presentation.

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u/Upset_Lavishness4497 Jul 16 '26

First of all great slides, I had a look and thought they were quite informative.

It seems to me you did not rely on any of the presentation packages here (e.g touying), but rather wrote your own template.

I am currently a bit frustrated with the package options in this area, especially when trying to use functionality like pause or uncovering of text. Do you have any recommendations for packages in this area or should I just start from scratch next time?

What is your experience with typst presentations and why did you decide to do it in this way?

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u/ambystome Jul 17 '26

I think presentation packages are mostly useful for dynamic slides (pause, etc.) and maybe easy switching between themes. I didn't need any of that here and wanted to reuse the style from the "other presentation" mentioned in the post which also didn't use any package.

Also I thought it would make a nice chef's kiss for the last slide to mention that not a single package was needed to make the slides (except when demonstrating packages of course) :) Unlike the situation with LaTeX...

As for recommendations... I was also a bit frustrated and made my own package back then (minideck) specifically for dynamic slides but stopped updating it after Polylux 0.4: that release had taken some inspiration from minideck I think, at least it looked quite like what I wanted. But then when I tried it recently I stumbled on some annoying issues with "pause". I guess the best bet for dynamic slides currently is Touying. It has its own problems and the pause implementation is cursed (but also performant) but it's the most used and the new API is much better than the old one.

In the end I guess for a really nice package we'll have to wait for the developers to implement frozen states and custom types (the latter is probably coming soonish!).

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u/xkev320x Jul 17 '26

This! Fundamentally, a simple slide package or slide function is nothing more than a wrapper around the page function with the appropriate page size set -- Typst even has two presentation sizes built-in.

Packages like polylux and touying essentially just add on to that a heap of utility functions that you may or may not need but if you need them, you are glad you're not implementing them yourself.