I’m a long time novice user of LaTeX. For a while I was using a pipeline from emacs org-mode to pdf that used LaTeX as an intermediate format, and I even used it as part of typesetting a cookbook a few years ago. But theres no denying that it’s pretty cryptic to use and not the most welcoming syntax. Its the kind of thing that it’d have to “relearn” every time I had a gap between using it in projects.

Recently I’ve been putting some serious effort into strength training. A friend of mine moved to a new place last year and didn’t have space for both his iron plates and his bumpers so I inherited a pretty great set of weights. A few days later I had a power rack in the garage with requisite HHIRFC flag behind it, and training a few days a week. It’s been a while since I’d done much lifting, but I do really enjoy it, it’s a nice and necessary counterpoint to being at a desk too many hours a week. I don’t know a lot about training, but I know that consistency and tracking are some of the most important parts.

With those things in mind, and wanting to have a reason to give Typst, a new more modern take on LaTeX, a try. Enter typst-trainer a simple “app” (and really thats overselling it) to take specific exercises from a TOML file, and put it into a decent looking one-pager. Theres no shortage of apps to track this sort of thing, and some of them are extremely impressive, but leaving the phone to play music or a podcast and doing tracking on a sheet of paper and a clipboard is something I prefer during heavy sessions when there is a lot of sweat and chalk involved. Nothing groundbreaking, but it works for me, and if you’re the kind of person who is at the intersection of liking programmatically generated documents, nice looking typography, and athletic training without using your phone, this might be something that would work for you too. If you find any use for it, or any similar workflows of your own, I’d love to hear about it.