palimpsest

Documents palimpsest version 0.1.0.

palimpsest turns one annotated manuscript into everything a peer-review response needs: the clean manuscript, a tracked-changes version showing every edit, and a response letter that cites the manuscript’s own real page and figure numbers — automatically, and always in sync.

You mark changes once, inline, in the manuscript itself. Two typst compile commands then produce all of it.

The problem

Responding to peer review normally means maintaining four things by hand: the revised manuscript, a version showing what changed, a letter citing modified passages and page numbers, and the certainty that no comment went unanswered. These drift apart the moment a last-minute fix lands. palimpsest makes the second, third, and fourth of those derivable from the first.

Key features

• Mark once, get up to four documents. add, del, rep inline in your manuscript; two compiles produce the clean and tracked-changes manuscript, plus a clean and tracked response letter.
• Real cross-references, not copy-pasted page numbers. pinpoint(<anchor>) reports the manuscript’s actual, current page.
• Quote the manuscript verbatim in the letter. pinpoint(<anchor>, excerpt: true) re-emits the real passage.
• Reviewers, editor, and co-authors, all colored and tracked automatically, each with their own letter section.
• Figure/table/equation/heading numbering that survives tracking.
• Diagnostics, promotable to hard compile errors with strict: true.

Installation

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

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

Full guide

The complete, progressive guide — a first revision round, marking changes, anchors, styling marks, shortcuts, writing the exchanges, pinpoint, xref, the change-list, tables, bibliography, diagnostics, wiring a real project, and palimpsest in the contexture ecosystem — starts at Your first revision round.

Four complete, working projects live under examples/:

• pilot/ — the smallest complete three-file project. Copy it as a starting point. (⇒ pdf: manuscript, tracked, response, response-tracked)
• fridge-study/ (⇒ pdf: manuscript, tracked, response, response-tracked) and emoji-email/ (⇒ pdf: manuscript, tracked, response, response-tracked) — two full, deliberately over-the-top mock studies (multi-page manuscripts built on real Typst Universe templates, @preview/unequivocal-ams and @preview/charged-ieee, with real figures via @preview/lilaq) exercising essentially every feature at once: two reviewers and an editor, co-authors leaving their own notes alongside them, change-list(), pinpoint both as a page reference and as a verbatim excerpt, cross-references, and a letter-only bibliography.
• coauthors-simple/ (⇒ pdf: manuscript, tracked) — the no-reviewer, no-letter, no-bundle shape: just add/del/change-list in a single file, for co-authors tracking their own edits with nothing else attached.

Combining with other packages

palimpsest’s letter(...) is just a description of a document to build — it combines cleanly with checkitoff’s checklist(...) and colophon’s report(...) in the same compile. See Combining packages.