Forester is the open source system most similar to rookery, and also its chief inspiration. Forester is an OCaml engine that Jon Sterling develops to power his website. It is not wrong to think about rookery as forester reimplemented for and in Typst.
Both rookery and forester have:
- Atomic notes with unique and stable names (ideas and trees, respectively)
- Bidirectional linking and transclusion, which is a fancy word meaning that you can embed one note in another as a window.
- Compilation to a standalone static site.
The core differences between forester and rookery:
- Forester rolls its own enhanced markup language, whereas rookery uses Typst. This has consequences for how hyperlinks, mathematical markup, footnotes, citations, and inline code blocks are specified.
- Forester requires an OPAM/OCaml toolchain and has a datalog-based query engine, whereas rookery is written in pure Typst.1 Both produce standalone static sites.
- Rookery can be incrementally adopted in an existing Rheo project—a ‘normal’ writing project or website that isn’t organized as atomic notes—by sprinkling
#idea blocks in as they are conceived, whereas forester must be adopted wholesale. - In addition to HTML and PDF, rookery can export to EPUB.
- Rookery allows you to give ideas human-readable, semantic names if you prefer not to accept the names it derives automatically.
- Forester was first released in 2023 and its latest major version, 5.0, was released in July 2025. Rookery is pre-release software (version 0.
x) that was announced in September 2026.