Beamer-Style Typst Slides Using Org Mode
Jul 07, 2026 09:56

Three things work together:

basic-theme

a theme for Touying that replicates my Beamer theme. It handles the styling of the title and section slides and provides some white, black, and gray color variants.

rlr-touying-scaffold.el

this provides an Emacs command that scaffolds the required files in a new folder. The include an Org file, a config file, and the two Typst files that are compiled to produce the slide deck and the handout.

ox-touying.el

a custom Org export backend. It turns the Org file into the Typst source that is read by the slide deck and handout files. With this, I never need to hand-write Typst markup for ordinary content.

To summarize, a lecture lives in one Org file. Compiling that file produces two documents, slides to present from, and a handout for students to read.

M-x rlr/new-touying-presentation asks for a title and a directory, then creates a subdirectory containing:

• config.typ: theme setup and metadata (title, author, date, institution, logo).
• talk.org: where the actual content goes. This starts out as just a #+TITLE: line and a comment to remind me of the conventions below.
• <slug>-slides.typ and <slug>-handout.typ: the two compile targets. The file names are created from the lecture title, making it easier to find them with a search.
• content.typ: generated from talk.org automatically. I never touch this file directly.

From then on the loop is: edit talk.org, run M-x rlr/org-export-to-touying-content to regenerate content.typ, then typst compile whichever target I want to look at. Of course, this being Emacs, I wrote a function that executes both the export, the compilation, and opens the resulting PDF’s with a single command.

config.typ’s project() function takes two options.

variant picks the color scheme: "white" (black on white, the default), "black" (white on black, good for a dim room), or "gray" (black on light gray). Modifying this requires changing one line in config.typ:

#show: project.with(variant: "black")

slide-level decides how many heading levels a talk uses. Most of my talks are flat require no subsections, so the default is 2: a top-level heading is a section, the next level down is a frame. Talks that need a subsection layer in-between require slide-level: 3 instead:

#let project(variant: "white", slide-level: 3, body) = { ... }

With slide-level: 2, * is a section and ** is a frame. With slide-level: 3, * is a section, ** is a subsection, and *** is the frame. Whichever level is “the frame” is the one whose heading shows up as the bold title at the top of the slide; the levels above it get their own dedicated section/subsection slides instead.

Inside talk.org, Org mode headings provide the section, subsection, and slide structure. Plain prose under a frame heading needs no special markup at all. it just becomes the body of the slide:

* Hellenistic Philosophy

** The Cyrenaics

*** Cyrenaic Hedonism

- Aristippus @@typst:#pause@@
- Pleasure is the only good @@typst:#pause@@
- Goal: maximize pleasure in every moment

The @@typst:#pause@@ line is Org’s own “export snippet” syntax, which passes raw target-format text straight through untouched. It provides the reveal content function It’s equivalent to the Beamer \pause command.

Speaker notes (shown only to the speaker, via Touying’s second-screen view) and handout notes (reader-only context that never appears on the live slides, only in the printed handout) are each their own block:

  #+begin_speakernote
  The goal is maximizing pleasure across a lifetime by maximizing pleasure in every single moement through self-indulgence.
  #+end_speakernote

  #+begin_handoutnote
The goal is maximizing pleasure across a lifetime by maximizing pleasure in every single moement through self-indulgence. This is a naive hedonism, especially compared to the Epicureans. For example, consider a person who spends any money they have as soon as they get it vs. a person who saves her money for a year to get something she really wants. Who will have the greatest pleasure over the course of their life?
  #+end_handoutnote

Both do not compile to the side on which they don’t belong. i.e., speaker notes never reach the handout and handout notes never reach the slide deck.

Most slides are bulleted or numbered lists, but I do sometimes need some layouts that plain prose can’t quite capture. There are three more #+begin_...#+end blocks to cover those cases.

Two columns, side by side:

* Stoicism
** Major Figures

#+begin_columns
#+begin_column
- Classical
    - Zeno of Citium
    - Cleanthes
    - Chrysippus
#+end_column
#+begin_column
- Roman
    - Marcus Aurelius
    - Seneca
    - Epictetus
#+end_column
#+end_columns

A full-frame image, no title, no margins:

** The School of Athens

#+begin_fullslide
file:school-athens.jpg
#+end_fullslide

A lone image inside #+begin_fullslide is automatically sized to cover the whole slide. That’s fine for an image that is close to the 16:9 landscape slide format. If a specific size is desired instead, an #+ATTR_TOUYING: line right before the image link overrides that:

#+begin_fullslide
#+ATTR_TOUYING: :width 60% :height 300pt :fit "contain"
file:school-athens.jpg
#+end_fullslide

The same #+ATTR_TOUYING: mechanism works on any image, full-bleed or not; :width, :height, and :fit pass straight through to Typst’s image(), and :align (e.g. center, center + horizon) wraps the image so it’s centered in its container, since alignment belongs to the surrounding box in Typst, not to the image itself:

#+ATTR_TOUYING: :width 40% :align center
file:diagram.png

And last, a big centered “statement” slide – the kind of slide that’s just one line, large, in the middle of an otherwise empty frame, for the one claim in a lecture I want to land without any visual clutter around it:

** The Thesis

#+begin_fullslide
#+ATTR_TOUYING: :size 2.5em
#+begin_statement
Virtue is the only good.
#+end_statement
#+end_fullslide

Nested inside #+begin_fullslide like that, the frame has no title at all – just the sentence, centered both horizontally and vertically, at whatever size :size asks for (2em if omitted). Left outside a fullslide, the same block still centers its text but leaves the frame’s title showing above it.

Once talk.org says what I want, M-x rlr/org-export-to-touying-content regenerates content.typ, and then it’s ordinary Typst:

typst compile my-talk-slides.typ    # what I present from
typst compile my-talk-handout.typ   # what students get afterward

I use this Fish function to compile both and open the respective PDF files without Emacs losing focus:

function compile-touying-deck --description 'typst compile the *slides.typ and *handout.typ files in a directory'
    set -l dir .
    if test (count $argv) -gt 0
        set dir $argv[1]
    end

    if not test -d $dir
        echo "compile-touying-deck: not a directory: $dir" >&2
        return 1
    end

    set -l files (find $dir -maxdepth 1 -type f \( -name '*slides.typ' -o -name '*handout.typ' \) | sort)

    if test (count $files) -eq 0
        echo "compile-touying-deck: no *slides.typ or *handout.typ files found in $dir" >&2
        return 1
    end

    set -l failed 0
    for file in $files
        echo "Compiling $file..."
        if not typst compile $file
            set failed 1
        end
    end
    wait
    open -g *.pdf

    return $failed
end

There is, of course, no need to leave Emacs for the shell.

(defun compile-typst-lecture ()
  "Compiles the slides.typ and handout.typ files in the directory."
  (interactive)
    (shell-command "compile-touying-deck"))

Even better is to export, compile, and open the PDF files with a single command:

(defun rlr/org-mktouying ()
    (interactive)
(rlr/org-export-to-touying-content)
(compile-typst-lecture))

The slide deck paginates normally, respects the progressive reveals, and shows speaker notes on a second screen. The handout collapses the whole thing into one flowing document – no pagination, headings numbered (1, 1.1, 1.2, …), and a plain line above each handout note marking where the text stops being something the audience actually saw and starts being added context for the reader.

None of this is strictly necessary – Touying is perfectly usable directly, and I could just write Typst by hand. What Org buys me is the same thing it buys me everywhere else — ease of writing and portability of content. In the end, producing the slides in Typst is no harder at all than it is with Beamer, with the added benefit of instant compilation and more accessible final documents.¹

The code and a sample presentation is on Github.