Typst template

[zouharvi]

This is to open discussion for creating a Typst ACL template and supporting it in ACL anthology.

Introduction. Typst is a typesetting system which fills lots of the niche of LaTeX but is modern and more user friendly. I have been using Typst for the last 2 years for writing reports, notes, proposals, making presentations, and recently for writing my PhD thesis. Some advantages of Typts over LaTeX are: instant compilation, sane and concise syntax, or the absence of legacy toolchains preventing basic functionality, such as including multiple scripts in a single LaTeX document.

Problem. However, one can't yet write an ACL paper in Typst without running the risk of being desk rejected on account of not following the official ACL template. I would like to fix this by building an official Typst template for ACL.

arXiv considerations. Currently, arXiv does not support uploading Typst source files similar to LaTeX. However, similar to e.g. papers written in Word or LibreOffice, if a PDF has not been generated by LaTeX, one can simply upload the PDF. The same would apply to Typst-generated PDFs. Therefore ACL papers written in Typst can still be shared through the usual channels.

Proposed plan.

• Discuss potential issues with/hurdles in including an ACL template for Typst.
• Assemble a small selection of people familiar with Typst or typesetting in general in a working group.
• Iterate jointly on the ACL template in a shared document.

[zouharvi]

cc @gsarti for interest and @mjpost from Twitter discussion.

[mbollmann]

FWIW, I am familiar with Typst to the extent that I use it productively for course notes and lecture slides, and have contributed a template to the Typst Universe. Feel free to ping me if this gets traction.

[alexanderkoller]

I'll mention that I wrote tracl, an ACL-compatible style for Typst, earlier this year. The paper that we submitted for EMNLP got accepted and did not raise any red flags. I am a former ACL publication chair and have paid attention to following the rules. :)

Now that people who are not me have discovered tracl, they have been exposing bugs that I didn't notice in my usage profile. I hope to find some time over the holidays to work these out.

If someone official would like to coordinate regarding any kind of official status for tracl, I'd be thrilled to talk.

[mjpost]

@alexanderkoller We ¹ recently dropped support for the Word template, on the basis that it was too hard to maintain formatting conformity, and that Overleaf removes many of the barriers that non-technical people might have had with with LaTeX. I haven't used Typst but it seems great, and I think making a public case for it, and building support in a grassroots fashion, is the best route to proceed. It seems there are many pioneers excited about it, and there is probably a large group that could be encouraged to try it with a good blog post or video contrasting it with LaTeX.

Footnotes

1. We being the mostly informal group of people who contribute to maintaining this repository. We did get Exec approval for that decision. ↩

[alexanderkoller]

@mjpost Yes, that all makes sense to me.

I'm glad you managed to drop Word support - that caused me so many headaches when I had to enforce conformity in 2014.

A blog post or video seems like a great idea. Perhaps another Typst fanboy in this chat would like to collaborate?

[mbollmann]

Perhaps another Typst fanboy in this chat would like to collaborate?

If there's anything I could contribute, given that I haven't used Typst for an actual research paper yet, then sure! I guess I might still know some packages worth highlighting for people wondering "how would I do [X] in Typst", maybe.

[confusedkernel]

Bumping this! I’d love to use Typst for ACL papers and am happy to contribute if there are anything I could help :)

[voorhs]

Typst is so much better than LaTeX. I'd love to have an official template!

[alexanderkoller]

Typst is so much better than LaTeX. I'd love to have an official template!

Give tracl a try, I linked it above. While it is not an official template, it does conform to the ACL style rules, papers pass the aclpubcheck script, and the first papers have been accepted to conferences. So I’d say it is ready for broader use.

[zouharvi]

Maybe I/someone could open a PR to mention tracl in this repo's README? Also happy to praise tracl on socials but I didn't want to do before @alexanderkoller announces it. 🙂