Output Types¶

The demo deck for this page is tour.typ (HTML, PDF presentation, PDF handouts). The commands below compile a deck in talk.typ to each output type:

# HTML presentation
typst compile --format html --features html talk.typ talk.html

# Static presentation (one page per subslide)
typst compile --input animo=presentation talk.typ talk-presentation.pdf

# Static handouts (final state per slide), the default when --input animo= is absent
typst compile talk.typ talk-handout.pdf

The value of --input animo= selects a static output type, and it is either presentation or handout. Any other value raises an error, so a typo never produces handouts without a warning.

By default, typst also uses the fonts installed on the machine, and these differ between machines. Add --ignore-system-fonts to make typst use only the fonts it embeds, so that every machine renders the deck identically. The demo decks of Animo use only these embedded fonts.

A slide without sub calls has a single state, so it takes one page in both static output types. A slide with subslides takes one page per subslide in the static presentation. In the static handouts, the same slide takes one page for its final state and one for each state that has handout: true. See The handout Flag for the details.

Each page shows only the part of the canvas that is inside the viewport in that state. A slide that pans therefore shows a different part of its canvas on each page. The handout pages show only the parts of the canvas that are in view in the states they keep.

Both static output types ignore all timing, because a page cannot change over time. Typst writes the same pages with or without the arguments wait:, hold:, delay: and duration: and the slide transitions. For example, a deck that plays itself in a browser and a deck that waits for the presenter produce identical pages, if they differ only in these arguments.

Content per Output Type¶

output-type() returns the output type being compiled: "html" for the HTML presentation, "presentation" for the static presentation and "handout" for the static handouts. The last two strings are the values that --input animo= accepts. Because output-type() is a context function, a call to it has to be inside context. output-type() returns the same value in a slide's body, in its overlay and background, and outside every slide. A deck can therefore show content in some output types only. The hint below appears only in the HTML presentation:

#let hint = context if output-type() == "html" {
  place(bottom + left, text(size: 0.6em)[Use the arrow keys to step through the talk.])
}

The target() function of typst cannot replace output-type() inside a slide. In the HTML presentation, Animo lays out each slide inside an html.frame, and inside such a frame target() returns "paged".

File Formats of the Static Output Types¶

A static output type is a paged mode, which decides which pages the document contains. The --format flag of typst decides the file format in which typst writes those pages. The two choices are independent, so either static output type exports to PDF, SVG or PNG. SVG suits embedding a page in another document, and PNG suits a program that accepts only raster images.

# The handout pages as SVG, one file per page
typst compile -f svg talk.typ 'talk-handout-{p}.svg'

# The presentation pages as SVG, the same way
typst compile -f svg --input animo=presentation talk.typ 'talk-presentation-{p}.svg'

# The handout pages as PNG at 300 dots per inch
typst compile -f png --ppi 300 talk.typ 'talk-handout-{p}.png'

Typst writes each page of an SVG or PNG export to a separate file. The output path of such an export therefore contains a page number template, and typst refuses to export more than one page without it. A PDF file holds all pages, so its output path has no template. In the template, {p} is the page number. {0p} is the same number, padded with zeros to the number of digits in the page count.