contexture

Documents contexture version 0.1.0.

contexture is the small, package-agnostic engine palimpsest, checkitoff, and colophon are all built on: it turns Typst’s experimental bundle export into a primitive any package author can use to produce a manuscript plus one or more companion documents that can query each other’s real, final page numbers, from a single compile. Reading this manual isn’t required to use any of those three — it’s here for whoever wants to understand how the ecosystem works underneath, see the mechanism demonstrated on its own, or build a new package on the same foundation.

You’ll rarely import contexture for what it does on its own — it has no notion of revisions, checklists, or word counts. You reach for it when you’re building (or combining) packages that need to produce more than one document from one manuscript. The three packages above cover what exists today; because the mechanism is package-agnostic, a fourth built the same way gets it for free, with none of the first three having to change.

The problem

Typst’s bundle export lets one compile produce several documents that share one introspection space: a query run from any of them sees content laid out in all of them, with real, final page numbers — because they were genuinely composed together in the same pass. That’s the primitive a glossary, an index, a list of figures, a reviewer response letter, or a completed reporting-guideline grid all need.

The catch: Typst’s own document(...) — the call that actually names one of those documents — cannot be nested inside another document(...). That rules out two independent packages each calling it on their own. contexture is the fix: the only place that ever calls document(...). Any package built on it instead exposes a small constructor that returns inert data, and the author lists as many of those as they like under one shared documents:.

Key features

• anchor / anchors — mark a spot in one document, read it back from any other, by its real page.
• satellite / bundle — one shared entry point that decides which documents come out of a compile, so several independent pieces of code can each contribute a document without fighting over who owns document(...).
• variant / preview — two small, independent flags any document built on contexture can read: variant decides whether something is there at all; preview decides how much you can see of how it got there.
• diagnose / set-strict — a shared way to flag a problem that turns into a hard compile error everywhere at once under strict: true.
• xref — like a bare reference, already correct across a bundle, but with the real page number appended.

Installation

#import "@preview/contexture:0.1.0": *

Requires Typst 0.15 or later, specifically its --features bundle export (still experimental).

Full guide

The complete, progressive guide — a quickstart, the anchor primitive, a fuller list-of-figures example, satellite and bundle, the two compile axes, diagnostics, xref, and composing independent packages — starts at Quickstart: a manuscript with a generated companion.

Built on contexture

• palimpsest — manuscript revisions and a reviewer response letter that cites the real pages.
• checkitoff — reporting-guideline checklists filled in with the real pages.
• colophon — a companion audit of the composed manuscript.