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Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

sile-typesetter.org

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Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#91

Post by walnutclosefarm »

svat wrote: post #54
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 ut…

> TeX is a program for typesetting, and IMO if one is a programmer, it is best used as a target or output format

That's the only thing I ever found it to be good for. Even then, it's a PITA. The world would not be a poorer place if it disappeared and was replaced something that that separated style definition, markup, and content in a reasonable fashion, and used modern language techniques (just a CFG would be a start) for the first two.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#92

Post by zzless »

bondarchuk wrote: post #57
zzless wrote: post #28

Earlier 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 am not going to argue about the tastes here but please consider the fact that TeX is a typesetting language. Ignoring whitespace altogether would make .tex files unreadable (as a comment below states). I am again puzzled by complaints about whitespace treatment in TeX (which has facilities for handling it, like \ignorespaces) at the same time having no objections to the choices made by, say, Python (which to me makes a totally wanton decision about such, also I am not suggesting that you personally are inconsistent in your opinions). Also, poorly written LaTeX macros in this case are not a reason to blame TeX itself.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#93

Post by tomrod »

lixtra wrote: post #48
tomrod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please keep Markdown simple as it is. Feel free to come up with something new that supports Markdown as a subset or overlaps with Markdown.

I'm unsure of the naming & organizational conventions for Markdown. Are extensions called flavors? If so, I was envisioning a flavor.

Markdown as-is is lovely.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#94

Post by jfk13 »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #19
drekipus wrote: post #7

Reminds me of reportlab, which I loathe only because of their lack of documentation. Typesetting is hard. But at this point why not use semantic html and a specially crafted css?

MathML is not even supported in browsers these days

That rather depends on your choice of browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#97

Post by pja »

drekipus wrote: post #7

Reminds me of reportlab, which I loathe only because of their lack of documentation. Typesetting is hard. But at this point why not use semantic html and a specially crafted css?

Sile will take Docbook XML as an input format. Close enough?

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#99

Post by cristoperb »

pja wrote: post #97
drekipus wrote: post #7

Reminds me of reportlab, which I loathe only because of their lack of documentation. Typesetting is hard. But at this point why not use semantic html and a specially crafted css?

Sile will take Docbook XML as an input format. Close enough?

This is the most exciting feature of Sile to me -- since I currently rely on a slow and memory hungry Java toolchain to convert docbook to pdf with fop -- but I just tried it on two docbook documents (a book and also a short article) and it failed to convert both. Apparently the docbook support is currently very incomplete:

https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/issues/1338

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#100

Post by dash2 »

mapierce2 wrote: post #83
Timwi wrote: post #79

I'm excited for the project, but disappointed that they kept the arcane syntax of TeX/LaTeX. Math expressions are hideous to write and read in LaTeX syntax.

Arcane, but I wouldn't say hideous. What's wrong with \alpha for α or \sum for Σ? Do you have a better idea than this?

I feel that the answer to your question is right there in your question.
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