# An Archive

of all of my work and notes that are digitized. Want to steal my stuff? This is
where you do it.

Please note, all of my work is licensed under [CC-BY-NC-ND
4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en) (that's the
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives 4.0 license).

## Typst compilation infrastructure

This repository contains a sophisticated system for reproducibly compiling
Typst documents using Nix, the purely functional package manager. Typst is a
modern typesetting system aiming to replace the venerable $\latex$ system.

Within the [2024 directory](./2024), an ongoing experiment is taking place to
create a monorepo organization structure for a large amount of Typst documents.
Some custom Nix infrastructure has been created to provide a similar package
interface to the familiar `nixpkgs` package repository. Instead of building
programs, however, it builds documents. Review [the flake](./2024/flake.nix)
for more information.

You can test this local compilation yourself very easily! Simply run:

```sh
nix build 'git+https://code.youwen.dev/youwen5/alexandria?dir=2024#digression-linear-algebra'
```

This will create a `result` that points to the compiled PDF in the Nix store.
Currently, the file is not marked as a PDF with a `.pdf` file extension, but
one should be able to easily `cp` the file from the Nix store into another
directory with a proper file name. Work is ongoing to make this as smooth as
possible.

## Goal of the experiment

The end goal is to produce an easy-to-use infrastructure for creating personal
repositories of Typst documents. LaTeX documents could feasibly be supported as
well in the repository with some refactoring, but this is not a priority as the
I am not currently using LaTeX.

All of the work is sectioned into a `2024` directory for two reasons.

Firstly, since all of the documents in the repository depend on the `nixpkgs`
and `Typix` specified in the central `flake.nix`, breaking changes may require
refactoring and maintenance of old documents. This is how `nixpkgs` works, but
these repositories host _documents_, not software. Thus, I have opted to
organize the tree in such way that each year should be its own standalone
repository. This means that a year's worth of documents can be frozen in time
at the end to ensure that all of the existing documents will be able to
reproducible compile in the future without any maintenance, as the `nixpkgs`
and `typst` versions will be frozen in time.

Secondly, this will encourage further development each year to incrementally
improve the infrastructure.

Eventually, if the experiment is successful, I may decide to create a
standardized library or repository template for people to use.