typists
Typst is a typesetting system that is based on Rust. It was designed with usability in mind and has attracted thousands of users. Currently the official Typst Discord serves as the Q&A forum for Typst learners. However Discord has some shortcomings. First its contents are not accessible to search engines. This means that unlike other languages where if I Google a question dozens of Stack Exchange answers pop up, all I get for asking a Typst question are the official Typst page and a small number of independent documentation. Additionally Discord's rate limiting is insane. Demanding phone numbers to merely access a service is unacceptable. To address these shortcomings some volunteers tried to setup a Typst community in Stack Exchange through their Area51 program. However due to unfounded accusations of "fraud" by unknown users, Stack Exchange seemingly made unannounced changes, rendering it hard if not impossible for new users to signup, stalling progress. Some users and moderators who did not do proper research and derided the project as a scam raised serious concerns, prompting some to reconsider starting Typst.se given the toxic culture. Furthermore their recent policy change removing an easily accessible privacy dashboard had many doubt whether Stack Exchange had been lying about how they use our data. While searching for an alternative forum that is more friendly towards beginners and respects our privacy, we stumbled upon topanswers.xyz. It ticks all the boxes: no bs rate limiting, easy signup, kind people, no account required to view content. As you can see from our Discord server we have over 6000 users and there are thousands of questions. We have volunteers ready to port the questions on Discord to TopAnswers as soon as we get the green light. The launch of Typst on TopAnswers will benefit both: Typst users will have access to an open, lightweight, user friendly forum, and TopAnswers will gain tons of traffic as well as new users. It would be awesome if we could get a Typst syntax highlighter integrated, as well as the Discord bot that compiles Typst code and attaches the output PDF automatically so that users do not have to manually take screenshots. Given that TopAnswers already houses a functional TeX community, it would be a nice platform for Typst too. To help consider our proposal, I have provided links to various Typst related websites. Thank you for reading. Disclaimer: I was not, and am not employed by, nor paid by Typst to make this proposal. I myself am a volunteer. Stack Exchange: https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/128185/typst Website: https://typst.app/about/ Github: https://github.com/typst/typst Discord: https://discord.com/invite/typst-1054443721975922748