💁🏻‍♂️ Introduction

🤷🏻‍♂️ Rationale

Most of our business processes at confirm IT are fully automated — but document production still relied on native desktop applications with templates that were hard to control and impossible to version.

We wanted «document authoring as code», meaning:

  • Web-based and self-hosted

  • Version-controlled with full history

  • Authentication and authorisation via OpenID Connect

  • Real-time collaboration

  • Reusable templates and corporate design as packages

No existing tool ticked all the boxes. Typst’s own editor comes close, but it’s a hosted service — our documents had to stay on our own infrastructure.

That left the question of which document format to build on. Markdown and reStructuredText lack the typographic control needed for polished deliverables. LaTeX offers that control, but the learning curve makes it impractical for non-technical contributors.

Typst struck the right balance — expressive enough for professional output, approachable enough for the whole team.

So we built Typarr: a collaborative, self-hosted editing platform around Typst.

🎯 Purpose

Typarr is a self-hosted web editor for Typst documents, built for teams that want to author, review, and publish together.

  • Replace desktop word processors
    Move document production to the browser, with version control and collaboration built in.
  • Keep documents on your infrastructure
    Privacy-aware. Self-hosted by design. Nothing leaves your network.
  • Empower the whole team
    Typst – powerful typesetting for professional output, approachable for everyone.

✨ Features

The Typarr editor ships with the following features out of the box:

  • Inline SVG preview
    Live-rendered preview next to the editor, updated on every change.
  • PDF export
    Compile and download production-ready PDFs directly from the editor.
  • Real-time collaboration
    Concurrent editing via CRDT over WebSockets. Changes merge automatically, no conflicts.
  • Group-based access control
    Assign viewer, editor, or committer roles per bucket, backed by OpenID Connect group claims.
  • Git versioning
    Every bucket is a git repository with built-in history, commits, and restore.
  • Drag & drop uploads
    Drop files or ZIP archives into a bucket to import them. Archives are extracted automatically.
  • Local packages
    Reusable templates and shared components as Typst packages.
  • Custom fonts
    Mount your own font library for consistent corporate typography.
  • Minimal operations
    No database, no object storage. Just a filesystem and your identity provider.