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The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

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Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#11

Post by kragen »

I admit I'm prejudiced by the author beginning the README by boasting about how "beautiful" their own creation is, but I'm dismayed at the thought of trying to do preservation and archival work on documents whose rendering changes every time Harfbuzz has a mandatory security update.

I was hoping to be able to soften this criticism by saying "at least it looks better than the output of the last layout engine I wrote", which would not be a hard bar to clear (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf is full of egregious typographical sins), but https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/commit/e72aafd58f855... (Liddell & Scott, I would have thought? Although it has no title page, table of contents, or even headwords, and https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlex00lidduoft/page/x... contains about 20× as much text) seems to be missing most of the definitions and doesn't even look that good. The first entry, αδην, defined by Liddell & Scott as "to one's fill" with 12 lines of elaboration, reads simply, "αδην adv. .". (Except with the proper diacritics, of course.)

That's probably just a bug or something, but I am therefore unfortunately unable to soften my criticism with such a compliment.

Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#12

Post by Mathnerd314 »

kragen wrote: post #11

I admit I'm prejudiced by the author beginning the README by boasting about how "beautiful" their own creation is, but I'm dismayed at the thought of trying to do preservation and archival work on documents whose rendering changes every time Harfbuzz has a mandatory security update. I was hoping to be able to soften this criticism by saying "at least it looks better than the output of the last layout engine I wrote",…

The test example looks alright: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples...

The kerning doesn't look great, but that's the fonts (DejaVu Sans + Libertine AFAICT).

Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#14

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Is there a bug bounty program for SILE? Does the payout double for every bona fide bug reported?

I'm sympathetic to the motivations that would lead someone to write a new typesetting engine. The problem is that in terms of essentially bug-free behavior and being completely understood and documented, TeX sets a bar that, despite its age and certain kind of clunky, is very, very high.

Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#15

Post by kragen »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #12
kragen wrote: post #11

I admit I'm prejudiced by the author beginning the README by boasting about how "beautiful" their own creation is, but I'm dismayed at the thought of trying to do preservation and archival work on documents whose rendering changes every time Harfbuzz has a mandatory security update. I was hoping to be able to soften this criticism by saying "at least it looks better than the output of the last layout engine I wrote",…

The test example looks alright: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples... The kerning doesn't look great, but that's the fonts (DejaVu Sans + Libertine AFAICT).

The test example literally has a double hyphen "--" in place of an em dash, which begins a line, provoking an unjustified momentary appearance of being an utterance by a character quoted in the French or Spanish style; and the author's name in body-text type right-aligned at the top of the page looks like a typographical error. Still, it's eminently readable, with reasonable hyphenation. My typographical sins in the PDF rendering of Dercuano were, in many cases, far worse (no hyphenation at all!), but I hacked together Dercuano's PDF renderer in 5 days as a last resort, and I don't claim that the result is "beautiful", although I wish it were.

Thank you helping me be slightly less of an arrogant jerk!

Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#16

Post by Koshkin »

ebg13 wrote: post #9

I think TeX is terrible, so keep it up please, but the examples all look really bad. If you want to sell someone on "this system will help you make beautiful documents", the examples need to wow.

Not sure if TeX is “terrible” or not, but the syntax here looks very similar.

On a practical note, it may be worth exploring other options: groff and TeXMacs (no affiliation with TeX or emacs).

Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#17

Post by zweep »

ebg13 wrote: post #9

I think TeX is terrible, so keep it up please, but the examples all look really bad. If you want to sell someone on "this system will help you make beautiful documents", the examples need to wow.

How is TeX terrible? I’d appreciate it if you could calibrate your response roughly to my level of discernment, which is to perceive LaTeX documents as better looking than Microsoft Word, but not be able to articulate why, or have much finer grained resolution than that.

Re: The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

#20

Post by mhd »

Koshkin wrote: post #16
ebg13 wrote: post #9

I think TeX is terrible, so keep it up please, but the examples all look really bad. If you want to sell someone on "this system will help you make beautiful documents", the examples need to wow.

Not sure if TeX is “terrible” or not, but the syntax here looks very similar. On a practical note, it may be worth exploring other options: groff and TeXMacs (no affiliation with TeX or emacs).

Lout[1] might also be worth a look.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)

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