Description

Possibility to specify the template to initialize a template package with.

A possibility to define multiple template in typst.toml would be like:

# The default
[template]
path = "template"
entrypoint = "main.typ"        
thumbnail = "thumbnail.png"

# The variants
[[template.variants]]
name = "student"
entrypoint = "main.typ"        
thumbnail = "thumbnail.png"
description = "Student format (default)" # A variant could maybe also be used to point to the default?

[[template.variants]]
name = "professional"
entrypoint = "professional.typ"
thumbnail = "thumbnails/professional.png"
description = "Professional format"

And that could be used with:

# Default template
typst init "<the template>" 

# Specifying a custom variant of the template
typst init "<the template package to use>" --variant "<the specific template to initialize from>".

# Listing the possible variants?
typst init "<the template>" --list-variants
# Outputs the list of each name and its descriptions, as well which one might be the default?

Use Case

• Templates with shared styling/functionality
• Avoid creating multiple template packages and bundling the same functions on each one
• Avoid bundling a lot of templates for the user to choose (or bundling none expecting the user to initialize it from scratch)
• Have the option for different template styles, for example:
  • APA has 2 main formats, student and professional
  • ACM (I'm trying to port the whole document class, and it shares a lot of functionalities and styles, and it would help avoiding creating templates for each format)
  • LaTeX standard/KOMA-script, both also share similar code, and it would help having an option to specify a default or select which template to initialize it with.