Allowing for a display name parameter in typst.toml for cleaner package listings in Typst Universe

[Spelkington]

Premise

Howdy, all!

While putting together the guided-resume-starter-cgc package, I tinkered around with the current name parameter in the TOML and discovered it must match the subdirectory for the package in @preview

The target audience for this package is less-technical folks — particularly university undergraduates who aren't necessarily Computer Science-oriented — and I anticipate that the vast majority of this audience will be going through the Typst Universe portal to initialize a new instance of this (or another) template.

With this audience in mind, I tried to use the name parameter as a "clean" name of the package, since guided-resume-starter-cgc is a bit verbose in the interest of avoiding collisions or using a "canonical" name. My hope was to use a more generic name when displaying the package to end users, such as "Resume Starter Guide" or something similar.

However, it appears that the name category is more akin to a package slug, and used to validate the package against its parent directory within @preview.

Recommendation

I understand the behavior of name as a validation check, but I do think it would be nice to have something akin to a display-name parameter (or something semantically equivalent) to declare a cleaner name. This parameter could then be used in GUI frontends for display purposes, such as in the packages listing of the Typst Universe portal.

While this may seem like a small detail, I've noticed that seemingly small things like kebab-case labels can be intimidating to a less-technical audience and may function as a barrier to Typst adoption. The kinder syntax of Typst versus my previous LaTeX template has been amazing, and I feel that accompanying this with a softer GUI label for packages would help encourage Typst adoption among this audience.

While this may not a usual practice among package managers (npm, brew, etc.), I feel that Typst's choice to encourage template creation via Universe makes this an appropriate addition to the package metadata schema.

Example

In the charged-ieee typst.toml, the current display name in Typst Universe is charged-ieee, matching the name parameter:

[package]
name = "charged-ieee"
version = "0.1.0"
compiler = "0.10.0"
entrypoint = "lib.typ"
...

My recommendation would be some additional parameter representing a clean name to be used in Typst Universe (or other GUIs):

[package]
name = "charged-ieee"
+ display-name = "Charged IEEE Template"
version = "0.1.0"
compiler = "0.10.0"
entrypoint = "lib.typ"
...

This label could then be used for the template's Typst Universe entry:

Caveats

In this case, the addition of a display-name parameter would ensure backwards compatibility. Current implementations of GUIs would continue to reference the slug contained at name, while updated GUIs could reference the display-name parameter for packages if they choose.

[Spelkington]

Just an addendum - I understand the actual implementation of this would be a pretty small change to the schema file. I'm willing to make a PR for it, but wanted to prompt a discussion first before learning how to run & test Rust.