Improve the documentation search

[Andrew15-5]

Description

I really think that the search needs some serious improvements, it's very common for it to be useless or confusing (i.e., buggy), which makes it less beginner-friendly (and a bad UX in general).

There are already a few related issues (that I was able to find): #331 (#353). There is #331, but it's more of a feature than a bug.

I regularly face the same issue of not being able to find exactly what I was looking for via the search. And I'm a savvy Typst user (and in general). This is a huge problem for newcomers that would like to find something simple in the search.

There are 2 major issues:

1. some commonly known things aren't present in the search at all (at least for the most common queries);
2. some entries are indistinguishable, making it impossible to know for sure which one to select.

Here are some examples:

1. Missing modules, e.g., calc, math, sys, std etc. Some functions, e.g., at (array.at) (which does show up when querying "array"). Some core concepts like set and show rules (I would also like to be able to directly search for show-set rules and set-if rules). The list is probably much bigger.

   calc

   

   math

   

   sys

   

   std

   

   set rule

   

   show rule

   

   array (does show `array.at` but as "at" without mentioning "array")

   

   at

   

2. Duplicate entries, e.g., round, floor, len (as "Length"), first etc.

   round

   

   floor

   

   len

   

   first

   

For things like any, std (set-if etc.) there are just no pages (or dedicated sections) yet. For these, I guess, the first thing would be to create/update corresponding pages (or sections), so you can at least link to them.

Reproduction URL

No response

Browsers

Firefox

OS

Linux

[MDLC01]

Additionally, searching for "lr" does not suggest the lr function.