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Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

sile-typesetter.org

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Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#31

Post by tinus_hn »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #24
charlieyu1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close, these are not plaintext based so you can't track changes with git, let alone automatic generation of formulas.

Word has track changes, though not the math support it seems.

In typical Microsoft fashion it has enough to check the box but not enough to actually be useful.

Does it generate diffs/patches that ultimately can be used to reconstruct the document? Can I take a document and apply a patch and get exactly the same as you get? Can I reorder and edit patches? The answer is no.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#34

Post by tokai »

ifreund wrote: post #30
tokai wrote: post #17

Am I having a stroke or are the examples not looking good? Subtle kerning issues and the page layout reminds me of a Word letter page. Maybe I'm not understanding its potential.

Maybe try opening the PDF instead of the PNG, the PNG images of text look off to me as well but the font rendering in the PDF looks fine.

I dunno - that doesn't help anything with the layout. I still see overlapping text, tables with crooked columns, bad spacing between paragraphs and titles. The kerning got better, even though there is still something wrong with the stroke weight of the font. Maybe its just a really bad font, and not something related to Sile. Choosing a bad font to showcase a typesetting system is a bit of a redflag imo.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#36

Post by tomrod »

ilammy wrote: post #14
mmastrac wrote: post #10

TeX is one of those bits of software that's so complex to replace, it'll take another few decades (and likely a few false starts) before we can get there. The fundamentals of TeX's typesetting are amazing, but everything else is just bolted on. You'd probably want to rebuild it with its own, custom language, perhaps inspired more by modern XML/markdown rather than the old TeX language. The biggest problem that we're…

TeX itself is not really complex. The implementation is fine. The hard part is the ecosystem. Any contender is going to face a daunting task of explaining why adopters should throw away 50 years of collective work of thousands of people that went into TeX packages in CTAN. Math notation is at best 1% of the reasons why people use TeX. Packages are.

I think the argument comes down to complexity. Getting Markdown --> Pandoc featureset up to a reasonable fidelity is the next stage IMO, especially if Markdown can be made to support the most common downloaded TeX extension packages.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#37

Post by Semaphor »

tokai wrote: post #34
ifreund wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe try opening the PDF instead of the PNG, the PNG images of text look off to me as well but the font rendering in the PDF looks fine.

I dunno - that doesn't help anything with the layout. I still see overlapping text, tables with crooked columns, bad spacing between paragraphs and titles. The kerning got better, even though there is still something wrong with the stroke weight of the font. Maybe its just a really bad font, and not something related to Sile. Choosing a bad font to showcase a typesetting system is a bit of a redflag imo.

In case someone is wondering, here’s a table from the doc book example: [0]

FWIW, in FF, Win the PDF fonts have aliasing issues when not zoomed in, Sumatra PDF looks much better.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/EERxV4W.png

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#38

Post by chadcmulligan »

tinus_hn wrote: post #31
chadcmulligan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word has track changes, though not the math support it seems.

In typical Microsoft fashion it has enough to check the box but not enough to actually be useful. Does it generate diffs/patches that ultimately can be used to reconstruct the document? Can I take a document and apply a patch and get exactly the same as you get? Can I reorder and edit patches? The answer is no.

Interesting, I didn't know Tex users would want those sort of facilities. I've used Word with track changes in enterprise environments and it does the job, I've never had to use patches for it though (and wouldn't).

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#39

Post by skipnup »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #11
chadcmulligan wrote: post #9

Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?

Word doesn't support many things in math mode, and entering it is overall slower and more fragile.

But you can just use the same syntax as LaTeX. Or a simplified version. Or use the GUI. It really isn't as bad as it seems at first glance.
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