Proof of concept:

#let matright(..aa) = math.mat(..aa.pos().map(row => row.map(y => {y; [$&$]})))

$matright(1, 22, 3; 4, 5, 6)$

Does what you expect.

(side note, it may be better to make the repr of arguments type different from
that of array type, otherwise it's a bit confusing)

Although manually inserting & at arbitrary place definitely feel like a hack.

I think this is also solved by tabular alignment because you can just align the first row and the others will follow.

We discovered that's not true for left alignment.

I won't have the time to implement this, but here are some thoughts:

• With the parameter as a single element, we can support left, right, up, down alignment and their combinations like left top. This can be implemented by setting the starting alignment of into_aligned_frame and changing the if points.is_empty() to something that handles plain left/right alignment.
• If we allow a list, it gets more complicated. We could support a flat list for matrices, but it's not clear to me why that should mean column alignment instead of rows. So it seems like matrices need an mxn list.
• The list arg could support strides: if the matrix is 5 wide and you pass in two elements for the columns (say left, right), then that pattern will be repeated for the 3-4, and 5 columns.

I think you're making things more complicated than they need to be. There is no real reason to touch vertical alignment, and the vast majority of use cases would be covered by simply allowing the user to set left, center (default) or right alignment for the entire matrix.

Hence "If we allow a list" :)

Hence "If we allow a list" :)

If you allowed a list it would specify alignment for each column. Though I can't imagine spacing would look very good in most cases.

My vote would be for removing & from matrices entirely, allowing the user to specify left/center/right alignment, and rather leave more arbitrary alignment to some future package. Though obviously @laurmaedje may feel otherwise.

I tried to use the same trick to match the rows of matrices using:

#let matright(..aa) = math.mat(..aa.pos().map(row => row.map(y => {y; v(8mm)})))

to go from this:

to this:

but it is still not perfect. I also tried the natrix package but that does not work for this example. Do you have other suggestions?

are there anyone on this? seems like a really nice feature to have. I just gave typst a go and was surprised by the default alignment being center for each element of a matrix with no simple way of selecting right or left for the whole matrix instead of manual &'s

I doubt anyone's working on it unless they've mentioned it here. The actual implementation wouldn't be that hard I would think, but there's some design decisions to be discussed and made.

Thanks a lot @Enivex for the quick response and appreciate the work you guys do on Typst and makes sense😄. I'll do it manual for now and see if it takes to much effort as i have to write a lot of matrices and if its better to try latex at present for some docs types

you guys

To be clear, I'm not affiliated with typst

To be clear, I'm not affiliated with typst

Affiliated or not, you're doing a lot for the project and we're very thankful! :)

@GuyKawaii I plan on working on the matrix issues/feature requests after I finish with another PR I'm doing.