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Package overviews from website listing

ntjess opened this issue · comments

commented

As a typst packages user, I want the ability to quickly distinguish/preview packages within the official website listing so I don't have to scroll through all github homepage links to find how they differ.

Motivation

At this point, there are 3 stylized box libraries with 1 more on the way as a submitted PR. So, when you search for "box" in the package list, you get this (with boxaroo becoming a 4th entry if the PR is accepted):

image

From the summary information provided, it is impossible to see how they differ. IMHO, it is still within the website's scope to allow users to distinguish, at least at a high level, between similarly-described packages.

Suggestions

  1. Hovering over the package URL can display an image specified in the package's typst.toml, or default to the first readme image if unspecified:
Proof of concept

brave_htcQlvEiE2

  • Instead of an image, perhaps package authors can specify an overview.typ document or something that produces an svg, this way the source is in typst format and gives more display options to the website builders

  1. A dropdown arrow next to each package can show a preview of the package's readme. To prevent massive readme's from clobbering the screen, it can be a fixed-height preview with a "show more..." link to the full document.

  2. A sortable popularity metric next to each repo so that, between similar options, I can identify which is most likely to have the largest community interest. CTAN shows downloads/week and activity, is there a way to get this information from GitHub for typst/packages?

Disclaimer: These are of course just suggestions to get the ball rolling -- I realize the dev effort is nontrivial and there are many other items worth prioritizing instead. However, with the increasing number of packages being submitted, a single list starts to look intimidating without more tools at the user's disposal to narrow packages to what is most relevant for their use case.

Thanks for reading! I'm happy to close the issue and submit feedback elsewhere if there is a Discord channel/etc. more appropriate.

commented

We plan to build a nicer-looking "storefront". The current package list was really only the most MVP thing we could build. For more relevant discussion on Discord see https://discord.com/channels/1054443721975922748/1176122103355953162

commented

Oh, I saw most of the comments were directed toward the compiler side, not so much the website. Is it possible to make a new forge topic so the two are less conflated? Scrolling through most messages, I didn't see any related to typst.app.

I'll close this issue once I cross post.

commented

I wanted to provide a good package overview in "Packages" chapter of my Typst Examples book. For boxes examples, see this page. Unfortunately, I have literally no time to work on this till New Year (end of the year, exams and so on), but PR-s are still welcome, they don't take much time to merge.

Of course, I think that in future something like this should be seen in WebApp. But there has to be someone who writes all this (and the Team is extremely overloaded already), so you either need to get an identical documentation format from package maintainers, asking them to compare their libraries with other, or doing something more complex.

Either way, it requires some large design work that should be discussed in forge. I think that for now creating the community-driven "package overviews" is the most fitting way.

commented

This looks great and checks all the boxes! Thanks to the team for putting it together.