I am really desperate for an alternative.
troff exists.
It doesn't have syntax highlighting IIRC
Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
61–70 of 181 posts
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 >" T…
I think many of the ills of this type this can be traced, at least in part, to TeX's only-partial whitespace invariance.
The shifts in behavior with an added newline (or absence thereof) or a comment, as above, simply wouldn't happen if the language ignored whitespace outright.
Of course, requiring tags for newlines/paragraphs would make raw TeX as un-readable as raw HTML. It might be worth the trade for the predictability, but for the era in which TeX was written, one without IDEs or LyX, I suspect that Knuth made the right choice.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#63I like Pollen. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
It still uses LaTeX to generate PDF right?
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#64It would be cool if the source code under "examples" could be viewed in the browser, rather than having to download the .sil file
There's a handy Firefox extension for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-in-brows... It allows you to ignore the server-sent mimetype & disposition and choose your own, so you can open the documents as plaintext in the browser.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#65If it can get sane error messages, then it's already miles better than TeX.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
For enterprise environments, where demands usually are low to non-existent, Word does fine. In academic environments, when journals are involved, when a document is being worked on by several people simultaneously (in varying meanings of that word) and when data may come from several different outside sources, it is massively inadequate.
I think there is demand of these features for Word users in the enterprise. Version tracking or reusing templates is huge productivity boost and also helps reducing mistakes. It is only that enterprise users have never thought of that because they don't know it is even possible.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#67Does 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…
> 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.
Perhaps. But I'd wager that more time is lost to the bureaucracy of universities and grant administration than to fighting LaTeX quirks. I'm not sure that "fixing" (La)TeX would result in a noticeable improvement in research that could be done.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#68Am 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.
I don't know enough about the system, but good text justification is only the first step in a good document. TeX, through LaTeX and the various report/book/etc environments has centuries of man time dedicated to getting the best possible output for a given document type.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#69Earlier 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…
People assume that they know a language because they read a tutorial online once.
The TeX Book is a work of art that we should all aspire to when writing software.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#70Author's 2017 paper on SILE in Tugboat, the journal of the TeX Users' Group: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-1/tb118cozens.pdf
A couple of the author's talks are also online:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIP_N9qQm4 [FOSDEM 2015, "Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System"]
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_kk20vlamo [GRANSHAN Conference 2015, "Global typesetting with SILE"]