Typstian

Typstian opens .typ files as editable source in Obsidian and renders the document as a selectable PDF in an adjacent preview leaf, including edits you have not saved yet. Click the preview to jump to the source that produced it, and move the cursor in the source to reveal the matching spot in the preview.

The Typst compiler ships inside the plugin as WebAssembly, so there is nothing to install alongside it — no Typst binary, no native helper, and no download at runtime.

Alpha. Typstian is early software under active development. It compiles and previews real documents, but settings, commands, and behaviour can still change between releases, and a large or font-heavy document can be slow on its first compile. Keep a copy of anything you cannot afford to lose, and please report what breaks.

Requirements

• Obsidian desktop 1.13.1 or newer
• A filesystem-backed vault (desktop only; Typstian does not run on mobile)

Install

Open Settings -> Community plugins -> Browse, search for Typstian, install it, and enable it. Do not enable another plugin that registers the .typ extension in the same vault.

Use

1. Create a .typ file: run Typstian: Create a Typst file from the command palette, or right-click a folder in the file explorer and choose New Typst file. Obsidian's own New note always makes a Markdown file, so it cannot start one. The palette command puts the file in the compilation root — the vault root unless you changed it — and the folder menu puts it in that folder. It is named Untitled.typ, or the next free name, and opens in the Typst source view. An existing .typ file opens by clicking it as usual.
2. Edit it in the Typst source view.
3. Run Typstian: Open Typst preview from the command palette. It is listed only while a Typst file is the active editor, so open one first.
4. Use the preview toolbar to zoom, fit pages to the available width, or save the compiled PDF into the vault.
5. Click rendered preview text to jump to the exact Typst source byte offset. Dragging still selects text for copying; links and controls keep their normal behavior.
6. In a saved .typ editor, click or move the selection with the mouse to reveal the matching spot in the preview. Keyboard-only selection changes do not sync automatically. Unsaved buffers must be saved first.

The preview follows the active Typst editor, except that opening a source imported by the visible entry keeps that entry's preview. Compiler diagnostics are buttons; select one to open its .typ file and move the cursor to the reported location. The command Typstian: Check Typst environment reports the embedded Typst version and compilation root.

The preview toolbar's Save button and the command Typstian: Save the compiled PDF to the vault both compile a .typ file, unsaved text included, and write the PDF beside it under the same name. The button saves the file its preview is following; the command saves the active editor's file. An existing file is never overwritten: the PDF lands on the next free name-1.pdf, name-2.pdf, and so on, and the notice names the file it wrote. Creating a Typst file and saving a PDF are the only two places Typstian writes to your vault, and both happen only when you ask for them.

Typstian recompiles shortly after you stop typing, using the unsaved text of every open Typst editor in place of its file on disk. Obsidian still owns the normal save lifecycle; the plugin never saves the buffer for you. Everything the compiler does not have open reads from the vault, so relative imports, images, fonts, and multi-page output keep their normal Typst meaning. Changes to dependencies from the previous compile refresh only affected previews.

A compile that is already running cannot be cancelled without discarding the compiler session, so an edit made mid-compile does not interrupt it. That result is dropped and the newest text compiles as soon as the running compile finishes.

Settings

• Compilation root: optional path inside the vault; defaults to the vault root. The setting reports whether what you typed resolves to a folder inside the vault. A path that does not is still saved, so you can point it at a folder before creating it.

Typstian embeds one font — New Computer Modern Math, Typst's default math face. Every text face comes from your system's standard macOS, Windows, or Linux font directories. The math face has to be embedded because operating systems do not ship one, and Typst fails an entire compile with no font could be found when an equation cannot be typeset; text has a usable fallback everywhere. Typstian registers shared font metadata once, then loads only the fonts a document selects into WASM on demand. It does not accept additional font paths or compiler flags.

If a document looks wrong, install the family it asks for — a .typ file that does not set #set text(font: ...) falls back to whatever your system offers rather than to Typst's bundled Libertinus Serif.

Troubleshooting

An import or image is not found

Paths remain relative to the .typ entry file. Keep the entry and dependency inside the selected compilation root. The default root is the vault.

A .typ file opens in another view

Disable other Obsidian plugins that register the .typ extension, then reload Typstian.

Privacy and security

Typstian makes no network requests, sends no telemetry, compiles nothing remotely, and never launches or downloads an executable. The compiler is already inside main.js.

It reads three things outside your vault's Obsidian API: the files your document references, your installed fonts, and the Typst packages already on your machine. That is why it uses Node's fs rather than the vault API — a Typst compile resolves #import and #image against the compilation root and needs the bytes of every file reached that way, plus system fonts and package files that live outside the vault entirely. Reads are confined to the compilation root, the standard OS font directories, and Typst's own package directories; absolute paths, traversal, and symlink escapes are rejected, and the plugin never writes to disk. Each compile runs in its own sandboxed worker with a 15-second deadline.

An #import "@preview/…" resolves only against packages you have already downloaded — with the Typst CLI, or by placing them in Typst's package directory yourself. Typstian never downloads one, and says so by name when a package is missing.

The preview loads PDF.js with isEvalSupported: false, so the one path that would run generated code over document content stays off.

Typstian is licensed under the MIT License. That license and the complete third-party license and attribution notices are embedded as a readable comment in the installed main.js and recorded in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

File size and Obsidian Sync

main.js is around 11 MB, because the Typst compiler travels inside it as a Brotli-compressed WebAssembly module instead of being downloaded at runtime. That is above the 5 MB per-file limit of Obsidian Sync's Standard plan, so Sync Standard will not carry the plugin file itself; installing from the Community directory on each device works normally.

Current scope

Typstian does not provide mobile support, hover, rename, go-to-definition, formatting, semantic tokens, or Tinymist's custom preview protocol. Clicking a rotated page does not jump to the source that produced it. Moving the cursor reveals the spot the surrounding source produced rather than the exact glyph under the cursor, and some cursor positions reveal nothing at all. Completion and PDF export are new and narrow: completions come from the last compiled snapshot, and the export writes one PDF beside the source on request. Syntax highlighting comes from the experimental codemirror-lang-typst 0.6.0 Lezer grammar for Typst 0.15.

Contributing

Building Typstian from source, running its tests, and cutting a release are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.