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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

#31

Post by munificent »

kragen wrote: post #15
Mathnerd314 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The faux em dash definitely caught my eye. The hyphenated "ory" on its own line at the end of a paragraph is another really bad look.

If these are the examples to pitch the system... it doesn't seem ready for primetime. That's OK. Every project has to start somewhere, but the README could stand to frame that a little better.

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

#32

Post by The_Amp_Walrus »

zweep wrote: post #21
choeger wrote: post #19

Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the only problem with TeX: You cannot parse it.

What does context-free syntax mean? And what does “you cannot parse it” mean? Meaning you can’t stream it, you need the whole file first?

Context free means that the language/program can be described using a "context free grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar.

Context free grammars are more expressive than regular expressions, but less expressive than full-blown programming languages.

If you've got a spare 100 or so hours and you're interested in learning more, there's a good lecture series on YouTube about this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeo...

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

#33

Post by kragen »

munificent wrote: post #31
kragen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The faux em dash definitely caught my eye. The hyphenated "ory" on its own line at the end of a paragraph is another really bad look. If these are the examples to pitch the system... it doesn't seem ready for primetime. That's OK. Every project has to start somewhere, but the README could stand to frame that a little better.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to influence the author to stop working on typesetting, but I found the arrogant boasting really annoying.

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

#34

Post by blt »

munificent wrote: post #31
kragen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The faux em dash definitely caught my eye. The hyphenated "ory" on its own line at the end of a paragraph is another really bad look. If these are the examples to pitch the system... it doesn't seem ready for primetime. That's OK. Every project has to start somewhere, but the README could stand to frame that a little better.

yeah, LaTeX tries really hard to avoid such a short trailing line.

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

#35

Post by marcinzm »

bjornjajajaja wrote: post #23
crazygringo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I thought you were exaggerating but it really is terrible . Page 15 of the manual is inexplicably 90% blank too. So it's clearly just a super -rough prototype, which would be fine except that when it brands itself as "its job is to produce beautiful printed documents"... it gives the impression that it already does this, when the reality is clearly far, far away. I think the project needs to be honest about wher…

Well it doesn’t even have a 1.0 release so that’s enough to cut them slack. For instance, the foundation of the house is most critical but when everyone looks at the foundation and asks, “where’s the house? This house can’t be much they brand themselves as a beautiful château but all it is is a big hole in the ground...” A project like this is no minor task! :)

>Well it doesn’t even have a 1.0 release so that’s enough to cut them slack.

I mean, it's at 3000+ commits and 5+ years so it's not exactly a new project. There's something to be said for doing fewer things but doing them really well.

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

#36

Post by marcinzm »

paulclinger wrote: post #30
twarge wrote: post #18

The manual seems to quickly disqualify the system. The numbers don't line up in the TOC in horrible ways. Then a little ways down there's a wrap figure that's got a horrible spacing problem. These indicate to me that the shiny new foundations are really quite wobbly.

It's an open source project that will gladly accept patches. I've submitted patches for those things that didn't work for me and while getting feedback is useful, getting fixes is better.

The feedback here isn't for the project really, it's for everyone else thinking of using it. Hacker News is a discussion site and not just a place to market things.

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

#37

Post by ttul »

choeger wrote: post #19

Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the only problem with TeX: You cannot parse it.

IIRC there are DSLs that are context free and which compile down to TeX. I just can’t recall at the moment any.. it’s been years. The layout engine inside TeX is second to none. Why throw out the baby with the bath water?

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

#39

Post by zweep »

sjwright wrote: post #26
zweep wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Generally when you can’t discern the rational for a preference, it often means the underlying basis is associative rather than objective. That’s how most of us discern most things most of the time—a particular appearance tends to correlate with past performance. You’ve probably read a bunch of very good papers typeset in TeX.

What I mean is that, with some things like music, I can say that this recording is better than this one because the musician is playing with better dynamics, or better pacing, etc, but with two chocolate cakes from a restaurant I can only say “this one is better.” I can’t give any advice to the chefs. Typesetting is like the latter, I can say “this looks better” but can’t say “it’s because the margins are wider” or the serifs are fatter.
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