Glossarium

27 July, 2023 - Tags: typst, open-source

TLDR: Glossarium originated from my personal need for a Typst glossary, back when the ecosystem was underdeveloped and existing implementations were inadequate. It has since established itself as the standard solution for glossaries in Typst.

screenshot of the glossary

This project was born at the end of January 2023. After a year and a half of active development and participation in the Typst community, I transferred the project to the Typst Community organization in June 2024, which now manages its development.

At the end of 2023, while looking for an alternative to LaTeX for writing my final study report, I came across Typst. I quickly realized that the project, despite many features still being under development, had great potential. At that time, to work around bugs, it was often necessary to retrieve the compiler code and recompile it yourself to have a working setup.

The feature I was missing was a glossary. The existing glossaries had very few features and were often abandoned. So I decided to start from the implementation of Sébastien d'Herbais de Thun, a Belgian master's student who had to code one for his thesis.

Based on his work, I turned his implementation into a robust library supporting the following features:

automatic detection of the first reference for the long form.
optional plural management.
user-forced long or short values.
optional term grouping.

The project is now available here: https://github.com/typst-community/glossarium.

The package glossarium is available in the Typst Universe.