Hacker News Reader

Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

That package still has the core limitation of Typst: images can only be placed top-middle-bottom and left-centre-right. Typst still has yet to support arbitrarily placed images.

View on HN

You mean absolutely positioning it? You can do that with the place function and displacing it with dx/dy from the origin (https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place). Example: #place(top + left, dy: 2cm, dx: 4cm, image("image.png"))

That seems usable for manual layout, but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page. I reuse my LaTeX code to make volumes of books, and I never touch the code. It's fire and forget for me, which this does not seem to solve.

> but it looks painful to use to place images without knowing exactly where they might end up on a page.

they end up exactly at the specified location?

Presumably they're referring to the ability to parameterize the target page size. In that case, absolute coordinates don't work well (if at all).

Parameterize! That's a new word I didn't know. It adequately describes how I typeset my books, and I must not be alone. The ability to tell LaTeX to drop a picture around here, to the best of its ability, with the possibility of moving it down a paragraph or two if it doesn't fit is vital for me.

I think that's a missing feature of Typst yes, to have figures be either "here" or "top next page" automatically, with that priority. It can't do that. The confusing part was that this has nothing to do with the images of this coffee stain package, because they are foreground/background and can be placed freely on the page (any corner or any custom offset from any corner; i.e from top left corner you can use page coordinates).

The coffee stains overlay/underlay text, so no layout problems at all.

But the dx/dy arguments also take percentages besides absolut lengths. I still don't get what the the other poster means by that fundamental limitation. I think they're confused about absolute positioning of background images vs floating figures. But typst has the analog setting of `[htbp]`, so the same "fire and forget" workflow is possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com