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Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

sile-typesetter.org

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Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#51

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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.

I think the font choice is a lot of it, at least. Sile may be a great typesetting system technically, but the examples kind of look, well, like they were put together by someone who maybe doesn't know much about good layout and typography.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#52

Post by lmz »

0xmohit wrote: post #35

Does anyone use ConTeXt these days? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt

I also used it to typeset a project report which had some msword specific formatting rules. I found it more customizable than LaTeX in that regard, but I did have to read the docs a lot more.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#53

Post by enriquto »

chrisseaton wrote: post #5
choeger wrote: post #3

Does it come with a context-free syntax? If not, that would be a grave mistake. Being unparseable is one of the biggest problems of TeX, IMO. Not the least because you cannot automatically work with TeX "documents".

I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!

> I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar.

Read the TeXbook. No, really, it is a beautifully written text. The program it describes is quite elegant. Most of the complexity comes from modern LaTeX packages, not from the core tool.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#54

Post by svat »

choeger wrote: post #3

Does it come with a context-free syntax? If not, that would be a grave mistake. Being unparseable is one of the biggest problems of TeX, IMO. Not the least because you cannot automatically work with TeX "documents".

TeX is a program for typesetting, and IMO if one is a programmer, it is best used as a target or output format: do all your "document" stuff somewhere else (don't use LaTeX), and use TeX just for typesetting. You can have your document in some parsable format, but not require it of the output .tex file, just as we expect high-level programming-language source code to be parsable but don't really expect to get much utility out of parsing assembly or object code.

Knuth initially added macros to TeX just as a convenience to save some typing here and there, and the tradition of (ab)using that macro ability as a language in which to program, inaugurated in a small way by Knuth himself and later taken to dizzying heights by others (such as Leslie Lamport with LaTeX, and hundreds/thousands of assorted "package" authors since, and the LaTeX team currently), is IMO a mistake.

If you use TeX just for typesetting, it is quite a nice program that does what you want, and has very good error messages (yes) and debugging output.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#55

Post by richard_todd »

massysett wrote: post #43
chadcmulligan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's acrobat editor, though its more limited than I assumed it seems.

Adobe's Acrobat editor is painful and barely usable even for ordinary prose. There's no way I'd try it for math. To be fair though, it does not seem intended for heavy-duty editing - it's more for: someone gave me this PDF, I don't have the source document, I need to make some little tweaks directly to the PDF.

Yeah Acrobat and ABBYY editors are really only useful as a last resort when you don't have time to recreate someone's PDF but you really need a couple words changed.

But they are life-savers when that's your situation.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#56

Post by xavxav »

choeger wrote: post #3

Does it come with a context-free syntax? If not, that would be a grave mistake. Being unparseable is one of the biggest problems of TeX, IMO. Not the least because you cannot automatically work with TeX "documents".

It's damning that there no truly functional grammar or spellchecker for latex, even ignoring crazy things that can be done with macros.

If some billionaire wanted to 'move the needle' and change society for the better I think building a truly better latex would be worth it. Each year some of the most brilliant people in the world sacrifice on the altar of latex, that could instead be spent on more productive research.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#57

Post by bondarchuk »

zzless wrote: post #28
chrisseaton wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!

My experience with TeX is a complete opposite. I feel like I can do pretty much anything in plain TeX, with a very good feel of what it is doing in its 'guts'. I wrote parsers in compilers in pure TeX (the latter was admittedly a silly academic exercise). It took a very thorough reading of 'The TeXbook' but after that I am constantly amazed at how deliberate and tasteful Knuth's choices were. TeX is simply ... elegan…

I'm far from an expert but I use LaTeX, and I distinctly remember there is some oddity such that you have to put an empty comment at the end of a specific line in the middle of some code that generates multi column figures, or else the layout gets messed up. That sort of thing just shouldn't be possible in anything that has the right to be called "elegant".

Edit: here it is: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/37597

>"The % (between \end{subfigure} and \begin{subfigure} or minipage) is really important; not suppressing it will cause a spurious blank space to be added, the total length will surpass \textwidth and the figures will end up not side-by-side."

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#58

Post by topaz0 »

skipnup wrote: post #39
empyrrhicist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The LaTeX input for Word equation editor makes it a lot faster, but it is still quite limited and often doesn't do what you expect for more complicated things. It makes the easy things easier, but the hard things harder.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#59

Post by svat »

mmastrac wrote: post #20
ilammy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> TeX itself is not really complex I'm not sure if we're getting hung up on the word "complex", but here's 60+ pages on paragraph line breaking alone: http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf Digital Typography is 700 pages long (not everything is going to be TeX fundamentals, but...): https://archive.org/details/digitaltypograph0000knut/page/n7...

The 66-page "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" is a research paper, and much of it is is the "complexity" of the problem itself, rather than TeX's elegant solution in particular (e.g. pages 48–59 are about history). In a sense, the generality shown in the paper (the various different things that TeX's algorithm can accomplish) shows how TeX reduces the real-world complexity of typesetting with a simple approach that covers all of them.

The book "Digital Typography" is, somewhat misleadingly, not a book that was written about digital typography, but simply a collection (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/selected.html) of several papers that Knuth wrote about TeX and Metafont and some related topics, over several decades.

Maybe the several hundred pages of the "Computers and Typesetting" series would be a better example for your point: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html

In any case, I agree with the comment you're replying to: if you use TeX itself without dragging behind you the entire ecosystem and all the packages (in particular, use plain TeX rather than LaTeX) you'll see it's not really complex, and the implementation is fine. Especially today, with things like LuaTeX scripting (and, say, opTeX) it is feasible to bypass LaTeX and packages and do things yourself — that is, unless external circumstances require you to use LaTeX and packages etc, which is still often the case (e.g. submitting papers to journals).

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