MakieTypstEngine.jl: a proof of concept for rendering typst strings in makie

SuperGrobi
Wed, 29 Oct 2025 19:08:48 +0000
Package Announcements

During the hackathon at JuliaCon in Paris, @Alseidon and I started playing around with passing typst strings (from typstry.jl) through makie, to a custom wrapper around the typst compiler, and back to makie, essentially trying to create a MathTeXEngine.jl equivalent, but for typst. (Thanks to @Kolaru for talking us through the makie side of things of the whole latex string rendering)

We managed the whole idea working up to a proof of concept state, which I would like to put out here for more people to try out: MakieTypstEngine.jl (be aware that we are compiling our typst wrapper binary on your machine when you load the package, so for it to work you need to have cargo available)

At the moment, the functionality the package provides has fully replaced (the often fiddly) MakieTeX.jl whenever I need to make figures for a presentation or poster that I want to nicely integrate within a typst document.

To register this as a real package, there are a few more things to polish, which are on the one hand about getting rid of the whole type piracy situation as well as not having to build the typst binary on the users machine (probably set up a jll thingy for that), as well as having someone who actually knows something about font rendering look over the way we are currently doing things, and help with making this more stable. (NewComputerModern for some reason is working well on the typst side, but the glyphs indices that we get back are pretty scrambled up)

In addition, the current api to get your fonts from makie to typst and back is working but feels somewhat over-engineered and brittle. Not sure if there is anything that we can do about this, as font resolving seems to be a general problem everywhere…

So with all that warning, I would love if you try it out and tell us what you think.

15 posts - 8 participants