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Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

sile-typesetter.org

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Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#141

Post by empyrrhicist »

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.

...no, you can't. Sure, for a few one liners it works OK, but it's not like an embedded latex environment. At all. I've used it extensively.

As far as speed, even for simple stuff the real time formatting gets in the way constantly compared to just writing text in a latex file.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#142

Post by zzless »

wrewrtet wrote: post #137
zzless wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what you mean by context-free languages because literally none of the modern languages have context-free grammars. This includes HTML and XML although I would not call them programming languages per se. C++ grammar is undecidable. On the other hand, TeX's core typesetting language (i.e. not using its macro facilities) is context-free. Quite trivial in fact. Pascal, which is the language used to build Te…

As someone who is intimidated by the thought of programming TeX, I think the following comment which asserts that it is badly designed seems unlikely to be coming out of nowhere. (MetaFont is apparently better than TeX) https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/602950 I'll quote the key part here in case that link stops working. > TeX has two programming systems, the "mouth" (which does macro expansion essentially) and the "st…

This description of TeX's process (originally by Knuth himself) is quite tongue in cheek but I fail to see why this makes TeX's programming paradigm 'awful'. Think of it this way: both C and C++ (even Rust has macros, which I heard is the new hotness) have a preprocessor, which is exactly what TeX's 'mouth' is. The fact that the language of the preprocessor looks very similar to the main language does not make it weird (Rust again...). 'Loosely synchronised and on demand' is a very uncharitable description of what is happening: would you call JavaScript paradigm awful just because events are asynchronously processed? One tricky part of TeX is output routines running asynchronously with the main paragraph typesetting algorithm. This is indeed a compromise made by Knuth simply because in his days the thought of keeping the whole book in memory (which is what a perfect page breaking algorithm would require) was pure science fiction. A mildly augmented design will fix this (indeed, some modern implementations offer exactly this) but the solution found by Knuth is still incredibly beautiful. Also, 'the mouth does not do arithmetic' is not true at all. While I am not a big fan of LaTeX, its developers are incredibly talented programmers and they have implemented a fully expandable (in TeX parlance, taking place entirely in its 'mouth') floating point library in TeX (it uses some eTeX extensions for efficiency but they can be avoided as well; I speak from experience, since I do not use eTeX).

Finally, please do not let your fear stop you from enjoying TeX: most users do not do any serious programming and its output is aesthetically superb. If one day you decide to write some tricky macros, there is a vast TeXlore that awaits.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#143

Post by zzless »

massysett wrote: post #132
thrown_22 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An amazing thing about the TeX Book is that due to TeX's stability, it's mostly still current. It was written in a day when the graphical computer was a special thing that required a trip to the lab. So the stuff it has about how to run TeX is dated. But once you know how to run TeX at your "site" (as they would have called it then) all the stuff on the language (that is, practically the whole book) is still good.

I especially enjoy the quotes at the end of every chapter. The one on grouping is sublime! How DEK found them all is beyond me.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#144

Post by zzless »

graycat wrote: post #109

I've been using TeX for decades. No, not LaTeX, just TeX as in D. Knuth's The TeXbook . I've been thrilled with TeX from my first usage to the present. Of course, when I want to write some math, I use TeX. I also have a collection of TeX macros I wrote for verbatim , cross-references, annotation of figures, foils, ordered lists, simple lists, etc. TeX is my standard for any good or better quality writing, e.g., serio…

I have really enjoyed reading this! My 'suite' is TeX+Emacs+C (although I write occasional code in Python, Perl, JavaScript, and a few others, a first love is a first love... ) but Kedit and BASIC sound fine to me:)

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#145

Post by dcuthbertson »

daly wrote: post #119
muds wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been struggling with keeping track of research experiments and code at the same time. This seems pretty cool! I like how this method is language agnostic and uses "matured" tools. Question: I'd love to give this a try; do you have any public code snippets?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_(computer_algebra_system... This is (most of) the source code for Axiom. The code is extracted from the latex for these pdfs.

FYI: axiom-developer.org/ seems to be down

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#146

Post by ilayn »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #80
xavxav wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd like to know what a "better LaTeX" means, and how that would move the needle, given that the only things you can't easily do in modern (Xe)LaTeX are things that you shouldn't be using TeX itself for in the first place, but have other tools do so you can simply embed their output. Especially given the availability of WYSIWYG-esque editors with "one-click" compile buttons that run all the nonsense that we used to h…

Proper programming language that is not meant to carry old silliness such as "oh back in the day memory was important so you have 256 registers" or "fixed point arithmetic should be fine" or "it's meant for typesetting don't use it for complicated stuff so a figure can float 15 pages whatever".

We have PDF as de facto media for handling output and text files for holding the source files. Better TeX means we are not using an archaic madness to go from Txt to PDF but able to utilize modern IT tools.

TeX is just old and died decades ago. Academia is holding it as a hostage because papers...

Disclaimer: ex-academician and a low key maintainer of TikZ

Edit: TeX as a language is horrific exactly what you would you expect from a computer scientist so it's not that Knuth is to blame, it's the rest that didn't get his vision such as academia still leeching off of it instead of using taxpayer money to generate a proper tool

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#147

Post by Turing_Machine »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #51
tokai wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, the typeface is horrible, no question about it, but the other issues mentioned are definitely also there.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#148

Post by teleforce »

zzless wrote: post #142
wrewrtet wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is intimidated by the thought of programming TeX, I think the following comment which asserts that it is badly designed seems unlikely to be coming out of nowhere. (MetaFont is apparently better than TeX) https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/602950 I'll quote the key part here in case that link stops working. > TeX has two programming systems, the "mouth" (which does macro expansion essentially) and the "st…

This description of TeX's process (originally by Knuth himself) is quite tongue in cheek but I fail to see why this makes TeX's programming paradigm 'awful'. Think of it this way: both C and C++ (even Rust has macros, which I heard is the new hotness) have a preprocessor, which is exactly what TeX's 'mouth' is. The fact that the language of the preprocessor looks very similar to the main language does not make it wei…

I'll probably try SILE just because it does not support macro.

I personally think the adoption macro is the embodiment of non intuitive programming languages and why a modern programming languages, for example Rust is supporting macro is beyond me.

I'm not alone in this regard, D a modern successor of C and C++ does not support macro.

Hopefully one day Walter will write document on "Macro Considered Harmful" to enlighten the subject.

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#149

Post by eesmith »

michaelhoffman wrote: post #128
eesmith wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, https://sile-typesetter.org/what-is-sile/ points out: > one of the things that TeX can’t do particularly well is typesetting on a grid. This is something that people typesetting bibles really need to have. There are various hacks to try to make it happen, but they’re all horrible. In SILE, you can alter the behaviour of the typesetter and write a very short add-on package to enable grid typesetting." Alas, I do…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_(graphic_design) TeX usually tries to adjust the space between lines so that a single typeblock is more visually appealing. Unfortunately, doing this adjustment independently for side-by-side columns leads to output where the text lines don't line up, and that is way less visually appealing.

Thanks for the link.

Why is that particularly relevant to typesetting a Bible?

Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX

#150

Post by TheRealPomax »

ilayn wrote: post #146
TheRealPomax wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to know what a "better LaTeX" means, and how that would move the needle, given that the only things you can't easily do in modern (Xe)LaTeX are things that you shouldn't be using TeX itself for in the first place, but have other tools do so you can simply embed their output. Especially given the availability of WYSIWYG-esque editors with "one-click" compile buttons that run all the nonsense that we used to h…

Proper programming language that is not meant to carry old silliness such as "oh back in the day memory was important so you have 256 registers" or "fixed point arithmetic should be fine" or "it's meant for typesetting don't use it for complicated stuff so a figure can float 15 pages whatever". We have PDF as de facto media for handling output and text files for holding the source files. Better TeX means we are not u…

So... XeLaTeX? Which has been around for over 15 years now? Modern unicode support out of the box? check. Compiles to PDF instead of DVI because obviously? Check. Normal system font support? very check. More than 256 registers? "what the fuck is a register and why would you ever need to care, it's not 1980 anymore."

Equal disclaimer: low-key maintainer of ucharclasses.

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