The directory that holds your Typst source is called the project directory, and you can compile it like so:

rheo compile path/to/projectdirectory

In general, there are two ways to configure Rheo:

1. By passing flags directly to the CLI command.
2. By specifying configuration in a rheo.toml file at the root of the project directory.

If you compile a Rheo project directory without a rheo.toml file, the following default settings will be applied to compile your project.

version = "0.4.0"
content_dir = "./"
build_dir = "build"
formats = ["pdf", "html", "epub"]

[epub.spine]
title = "[project directory name]"

Without a spine config, every Typst file under content_dir is included, ordered by the directory-scan default.

To point Rheo to a rheo.toml file that is not at the root of the project directory, specify it directly via the CLI:

rheo compile path/to/project --config path/to/config

Per-page footnotes

In HTML and EPUB output, Rheo produces one output file per page. By default it resets the footnote counter to 1 at the start of every page, so each page numbers its footnotes independently. To let footnotes accumulate continuously across the whole bundle instead, set reset_footnotes = false under [html] or [epub]:

[html]
reset_footnotes = false   # let footnotes accumulate across pages (default: true)

The key is per-format: set it on [html] and [epub] independently. It defaults to true, and as with other settings the CLI takes precedence over rheo.toml, which takes precedence over the default (there is no CLI flag for it). PDF is unaffected — it combines your project into a single document, so its footnotes are always continuous regardless of this key.