Reading time

Every page reaches its template knowing how long it takes to read. Nothing to declare on the page itself.

#let page(page, body) = {
  text(fill: gray)[#page.reading.minutes min read]
  body
}

An empty page reads as zero minutes, not one.

The rate

200 words a minute by default: the figure every other generator uses, and the one a reader has been calibrated against by every “6 min read” badge they have seen.

content {
  reading { wpm 250 }
}

It is a fact about the language, not about the site, so a language may state its own. Japanese and Chinese are read several times faster by word, and a site in one reported every article as a fraction of the read it is:

languages {
  en { name "English" }
  ja { name "日本語"; wpm 600 }
}

A language with no wpm uses content { reading { wpm } }, which is the same fallback author and description follow.

Counted from the source

The count comes from the page’s Typst source, not its rendered HTML. The render has not happened yet when a template is handed its page, and a listing entry is built earlier still. That makes it an estimate, which a reading time is anyway.

Two consequences:

• Code lines do not count. A line starting with # or // is machinery (#import, #let), and counting it inflates a short page most.
• Inline markup counts as the words it reads as. #emph[one] is one word, and a heading contributes its words but not its =.

In a listing

Listing rows carry no reading estimate. If a collection index needs one per row, put it in the page’s own frontmatter and read it back off entry.extra.