Finally getting to start the year off right. As I’ve kind of alluded to last year, programming is not my core focus: it’s been much more of a pass time for me. As such, it’s not very often I actually work on projects outside of practicing web development or making quick scripts to solve certain problems.
This time, I actually thought of something that might be useful to others.
Ever since I’ve been looking into different text editors, I’ve also been looking at different markup languages as well. I’ve experimented with several: Markdown (of course), LaTeX, ASCIIdoc, and Groff1, and it’s been enlightening to see where each of them excel. The only problem I face though is when I want to use any of these languages to format a specific way.
The problem with a lot of these languages is the amount of fluff and extensions you need to really get what you need done. In this case, I’ve been looking to start an adventure using Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and that game has certain ways of laying out text for things like creatures, hazards, and treasures. Now, there are a few established means to do it in some of these languages. For markdown, you’ve got the community vault for Obsidian with its plugins for rendering and you’ve also got Scribe for a custom markdown syntax similar to Homebrewery for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. While it works fine for preping for adventures, it feels very restrictive when writing, which conflicts really hard with markdown. Likewise, ASCIIdoc has a well maintained plugin, too, asciidoctor-p2e, but getting it sorted out with my unfamiliarity with the Ruby programming language has been a headache.
Me being persnickety like this is what brought me to discover typst, a hybrid language similar to LaTeX, but much easier to write in and (for our case) more manageable to write extensions for. I’ve been curious about language for some time after first hearing about it from watching Sylvan Franklin’s overview video. It was fairly easy to wrap my head around, but it didn’t seem to offer much more that I was looking for; however, when I started to explore the plugins for it, that’s when I saw potential.
A little project was sitting in the back of templates, Owlbear, 5th edition right in Typst. Now I knew what I wanted to make. If someone can set this language up for D&D, how hard can setting it up for Pathfinder be?
Did you Know Typst is Turning Complete?
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Groff and LaTeX are more typesetting languages. While they can and are typically used for general writing, their main function lines in more particularly in document layout. Still, understanding those languages, especially LaTeX, has been really handy, but the abundance of boilerplating in both of them has been more than I would want to deal with for general writing. ↩︎
