Shifu Quarto templates

Shīfù (師傅): Chinese; n. expert instructor or father/teacher

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For a while, I’ve been using Andrew Heiss’ excellent custom LaTeX templates, hikmah, which themselves build on Kieran Healy’s template. While I’ve really enjoyed working with those, I wanted to create my own version - one that reflects my personal style and takes advantage of new tools.

Recently, I’ve been learning Typst, and this project represents a reimplementation of the Hikmah-style academic template using Typst. I owe particular thanks to Christopher Kenny and his excellent ctk-article template, which helped me understand Typst’s file structure and how to pull metadata from YAML into Typst dynamically.

The result is Shifu, a modern Typst-based academic manuscript template that blends aspects of Andrew Heiss’ hikmah and hikmah-manuscript variants, with additional refinements and customizations planned for future releases.

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Layout Options

Shifu currently supports two layout modes for author formatting:

• Default (block-author = true) Authors are displayed in a grid layout (up to 3 columns).
  • Similar to the original hikmah template.
  • Use this for manuscripts with a small number of authors.
• Inline (block-author = false) Authors are listed on a single line, followed by their affiliations below
  • More typical of journal-style layouts.
  • Recommended when you have 4 or more authors.

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Installation

To install the templates in your Quarto project, run:

quarto add C-Monaghan/shifu-academic-quarto

After installation, you can reference the template in your YAML header:

format:
  shifu-typst: default

or

format:
  shifu-typst:
    block-author: false

Shifu Typst (default)

Shifu Tyspt (block-author = false)

Acknowledgements

This project draws inspiration from the following excellent works:

• Andrew Heiss
• Christopher Kenny