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I like Typst, but I've had a couple issues so far:

1. The line spacing. It's not defined as baseline to baseline, but as the space inbetween two lines of text. Very difficult for an assignment with a prescribed line height since it usually refers to a baseline-baseline measure. 2. While having multiple columns is really easy, adding floating elements for the text to wrap around seems not possible. There's a reason all these CV templates have the info bar on the right instead of the left.



You can change how the bounding box Typst uses for layout is defined (i.e. set the top and bottom edges both to the baseline), then I would imagine the spacing would be baseline to baseline. Would need to adjust the space before a paragraph to compensate though.


https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4224

This issue and others like it are dealbreakers for me. There are numerous related issues, but the developers are stubbornly sticking to their interpretation—using the older definition of leading from the days of metal type, rather than the more modern concept of line-spacing. No other software or modern typesetting system I know of uses this approach anymore. This is particularly frustrating since I work with a lot of multilingual text, including Arabic, and it's very difficult to align the baselines when setting text in more than one column.


As one of the core developers, I would say "stubbornly sticking to their interpretation" is not entirely fair. I am open to changing this, but I don't want to do it hastily --- because that means changing things twice. Figuring out all the correct behaviours, in particular with equations and inline objects, is challenging. I tried to constructively present some arguments in favor and against the proposed changes in the linked issue, but I simply did not have time to push things forward beyond that myself so far.


I gotta say though, Typst is powerful enough to implement a custom line spacing. Using the measure command you can get the height of the current font and use that to automatically convert. It's just cumbersome.




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