Properly bundle assets / avoid base64 encoding files

[videah]

Embedding images (and other assets) as base64 strings feels a bit like an anti-pattern to me, I’d like to be able to cache large images and blocking first paint waiting for everything isn’t a great user experience

[breezykermo]

Thanks for your interest in the project!

Rheo embeds images as base64 strings in HTML output as this is what the underlying Typst compilation does at the moment. This is not something that I currently want to change, as one of the design goals of Rheo is for every Typst file to 'just work' in Rheo also.

There are a number of ways you can currently work around this in the upstream version of Rheo. One of these is using the (currently undocumented) copy/assets attribute in rheo.toml, i.e.:

version = "0.2.0"
assets = ["*.png", "*.jpeg"]

This should copy all the files that match the glob strings in the content directory into the build directory. You can also specify the assets attribute per-format, i.e. under [html]. You can then use Typst HTML elems directly for the image with a source.

The other way is to use the new bundle export syntax in your Typst files. I have just merged two PRs (#98 and #102) that should enable Rheo to support this syntax.

I would recommend using the assets syntax for now, as the bundle support is experimental and mostly untested.