sphinx-typst-render

Compile Typst sources during a Sphinx or Jupyter Book build. Each source becomes a PDF students can download, plus an optional inline preview image that follows the page theme.

Typst ships inside the typst wheel as a statically linked extension module, so there is no typst CLI to install and no Rust toolchain on the build machine.

Install

pip install sphinx-typst-render

Enable

In a Jupyter Book _config.yml:

sphinx:
  extra_extensions:
    - sphinx_typst_render

In a plain Sphinx conf.py:

extensions = ["sphinx_typst_render"]

Use

```{typst} worksheets/week3.typ
:label: Week 3 worksheet
```

The block renders nothing into the page. It compiles worksheets/week3.typ and adds the resulting PDF to the theme's download menu, beside the page's own .ipynb and .pdf entries, under a heading you configure.

Pass :inline: to also show a preview image and a download link in the body.

Options

Configuration

The download menu

Rendered PDFs are added to the download dropdown that sphinx-book-theme puts in the article header, so students find them where they already look for the page source. Two headings separate the groups, and both are configurable because what the page is differs per project:

sphinx:
  config:
    typst_render_source_label: Manual      # or Chapter, Page, Book
    typst_render_downloads_label: Worksheets

That renders as:

Manual
  .ipynb
  .pdf
Worksheets
  Organizer 1.1 (fillable)

Set either to an empty string to leave that group unlabelled.

The headings are inserted by a small stylesheet and script shipped with this package. They are not built server side because the theme's button macro dispatches on a fixed set of item types and forces its own CSS class, so a non-link entry cannot be expressed through the header_buttons context.

Without a theme that provides such a menu, the PDFs are still written and copied, and a warning names the page whose downloads are unreachable. Use :inline: in that case.

Why SVG previews

With :inline:, an SVG preview is line art, so a theme that inverts diagrams for dark mode handles it correctly, and it stays sharp at any zoom. Use :preview: png for a worksheet that contains photographs, and pair it with whatever class your theme uses to opt out of inversion:

```{typst} worksheets/week5.typ
:preview: png
:class: no-invert
```

Fillable PDFs

Typst cannot emit interactive form fields on its own. Support is requested in typst/typst#1765 and is still open. This package therefore delegates to typst-fillable, which reads field geometry back out of the compiled document with typst.query(), draws a transparent AcroForm overlay with ReportLab, and merges it with pypdf.

Mark fields in the Typst source with the helper, then add :fillable::

#import "/_typst_lib/capture_field.typ": text_field, checkbox_field, textarea_field

Measured $U_(i n)$: #text_field("u_in", width: 80pt)

Did the output clip? #checkbox_field("clipped")

Explain the discrepancy:
#textarea_field("discussion", height: 60pt)

capture_field.typ is staged into _typst_lib/ at the root of your Sphinx source directory on every build, so the import path above is stable wherever the worksheet lives. Set typst_render_stage_field_library = False to manage it yourself.

Available helpers are text_field, textarea_field, checkbox_field, and radio_field, plus the lower level capture_field.

Field length

ReportLab caps every text field at 100 characters by default, which stops a worksheet answer mid-sentence. This package overrides that with an explicit, generous cap:

sphinx:
  config:
    typst_render_field_max_length: 10000   # 0 strips the limit entirely

The value is written explicitly rather than omitted because some readers treat a missing /MaxLen as zero and then refuse all input. Stripping it is still available with 0, for projects that have checked their readers cope. Either way it is a config change, not a new release of this package. A single block can override it with :max-length:.

Only text fields are affected. A cap on a checkbox would be meaningless.

Caching

Output is written beside the source and skipped when nothing relevant changed. The cache key covers the source, every other .typ file in the same folder, the staged helper, and the render options.

Imports that reach outside the source folder are not tracked. Keep shared partials next to the worksheets that use them, or touch the importing file to force a rebuild.

Add the generated artefacts to .gitignore:

*.typst-stamp

Commit the PDFs if you want the book to build without recompiling, or ignore them too and let CI regenerate them.

Licence

MIT