Introduction to Touying

Touying is a powerful slide/presentation package for Typst. It is similar to LaTeX Beamer but benefits from Typst's modern syntax and fast compilation. Throughout this documentation we use slides to refer to the whole slideshow, slide for a single page, and subslide for a sub-page produced by an animation step.

Why Use Touying?

• vs. PowerPoint — Touying follows a "content and style separation" philosophy. You write plain text with lightweight markup, and themes handle the visual design automatically. This is especially productive for research-heavy presentations with code blocks, mathematical formulas, and theorem environments.
• vs. Markdown Slides — Typst gives you fine-grained typesetting control (headers, footers, custom layouts, and first-class math support) that Markdown-based tools struggle to provide. Touying adds #pause and #meanwhile for incremental animations that feel natural in a code-first workflow.
• vs. Beamer — Touying compiles in milliseconds instead of seconds (or tens of seconds). Its syntax is far more concise, and creating or modifying a theme is straightforward. Feature parity with Beamer is high, plus Touying offers extras like touying-reducer for animated CeTZ/Fletcher diagrams.
• vs. Polylux — Touying does not rely on counter and locate to implement #pause, so it avoids the performance penalty those primitives incur. It also provides a richer set of theme utilities and a unified config API that lets you switch themes with minimal changes to your document.

About the Name

"Touying" (投影, tóuyǐng) means "projection" in Chinese — just as the German word Beamer means projector in LaTeX's world.

Where to Write Your Slides

You have two main options:

Option	Description
Typst Web App	Browser-based editor. No installation needed; just open typst.app, create a new project, and start writing. Supports real-time preview and collaboration.
Tinymist for VS Code	A full-featured Typst LSP extension for VS Code. Provides syntax highlighting, autocomplete, error diagnostics, and a built-in slide preview panel.

Both options automatically download Touying from the Typst package registry — no separate installation step is required.

Universe

Tired of built-in themes?

Typst Universe has a wide variety of themes uploaded by touying users, take a look, maybe you'll like it.

Gallery

Touying provides a gallery where community members share their slides. You are encouraged to contribute your own work!

Contribution

Touying is free, open-source, and community-driven. Visit GitHub to open issues, submit pull requests, or join the touying-typ organization.

License

Touying is released under the MIT license.