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Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

sile-typesetter.org

11–20 of 80 posts

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#11
post #9

Some sample inputs–outputs would be great.

I found a lot of examples in the full manual here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simoncozens/sile/master/do...

The syntax is very similar to LaTeX, but it's more modern in that it has native support for fonts and images, and uses Lua as its scripting language.

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#13
I have looked at the PDF manual linked to from the homepage. If that PDF is produced bye Sile itself, I'm not impressed because the rendered text looks crowded. Perhaps the choice of the font is at fault, perhaps the engine lacks TeX's font kerning, perhaps.. Whatever the reason, the output is IMO ugly.

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#14
post #9

Some sample inputs–outputs would be great.

From the PDF manual file[0] it is at glance almost similar to Latex.

  \begin[papersize=a4]{document}
  \chapter{Hi there}
  Hello world

  \include[src=chapter2]
  \end{document}
Unfortunately, the power of Latex for maths display and vectorized graphs are completely absent. It also states image handling is still rudimentarily available (only PNG files, for example). I also am not really impressed by the type setting from the PDF, but this might be due to its focus on the engine and not the aesthetics of the typesetting (which will hopefully addressed soon to convince Tex users!).

Personally I don't "program" in Tex, I only write. The benefits with regard to (La)Tex therefore seems minor to me. However, if you program in Tex (like, designing templates perhaps?) I can understand you don't want to fool around with an ancient system like Tex and SILE can be an excellent alternative. The source is on Github [1], so everyone can contribute!

[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simoncozens/sile/master/do... [1] https://github.com/simoncozens/sile

PS. Because the author writes SILE, not sile or Sile; is SILE an acronym?

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#15
post #7

Does it support typesetting mathematical formulas like tex/latex does? That's a very important feature for any kind of scientific publishing.

It doesn't, yet; TeX is very good at that, so if that's a need you have, stick with TeX. I'm not trying to corner the whole typesetting market!

However, it shouldn't be difficult (especially now that MathJax is in Javascript, a language not a million miles away from Lua) to add support for maths typesetting. Patches welcome!

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#16
post #2

Does SILE offer any advantages when compared to LuaTeX? ( http://www.luatex.org/ ) LuaTeX seems to have all the same benefits, but in contrast to SILE, it also benefits from the CTAN archive. So what's the selling point of SILE over LuaTeX?

LuaTeX gives you hooks into the TeX system to customise certain aspects of the program's behaviour. But you can't customise the core TeX algorithms. Because the whole of SILE is written in Lua, you can replace any of the core components.

For instance, grid typesetting is a known difficult problem in TeX and its derivatives, but it's very easy in SILE because you just change the way vboxes are added to the vertical list; it's about 30 lines of code.

The frames support is pretty compelling for me as well, and will be even more so as soon as balanced frames are finished.

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#17
post #8
post #2

Does SILE offer any advantages when compared to LuaTeX? ( http://www.luatex.org/ ) LuaTeX seems to have all the same benefits, but in contrast to SILE, it also benefits from the CTAN archive. So what's the selling point of SILE over LuaTeX?

To me, it looks like this is a tool mainly for people who aren't already comfortable and at home in the *TeX environment. As one of those people, I'm very interested in what the syntax of this project ends up looking like. My few experiences with TeX were fairly frustrating, with multiple ways to do things (is it \bf or \textbf?) and a relatively large amount of boilerplate/magic incantations required to get a docume…

This isn't designed for people who don't know TeX, although of course they're welcome to use it. It was designed to solve particular typesetting problems (which came up primarily in the context of typesetting Bibles, parallel texts, and especially in non-Latin alphabets) which were difficult to achieve in TeX.

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#18
post #13

I have looked at the PDF manual linked to from the homepage. If that PDF is produced bye Sile itself, I'm not impressed because the rendered text looks crowded. Perhaps the choice of the font is at fault, perhaps the engine lacks TeX's font kerning, perhaps.. Whatever the reason, the output is IMO ugly.

The manual shows about 80 characters per line. It should be around 66 for optimal readability.

One of the things I like about LaTeX is that you don't have to know about this stuff, and since it's not entirely trivial to change the page margins it's really hard for a novice to make such a mistake.

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#19
post #6
post #2

Does SILE offer any advantages when compared to LuaTeX? ( http://www.luatex.org/ ) LuaTeX seems to have all the same benefits, but in contrast to SILE, it also benefits from the CTAN archive. So what's the selling point of SILE over LuaTeX?

According to the doc it's a less-hackish grid-based layout, apart from the usual benefits of a clean room reimplementation. But yes, in general TeX is hard to beat and I'd like to see some good comparisons about tricky stuff, especially considering that you won't switch because you find TeX' syntax to baroque… I did get a bit more interested after I read who is writing this, as Simon Cozens is pretty well-known in Pe…

Just to clarify - the grid layout isn't compulsory; it's an optional package. But it's a good example of a thing which is a hard problem in TeX (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1418/grid-system-in-l...) and an easy one in SILE.

Re: Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

#20
post #9

Some sample inputs–outputs would be great.

From the PDF manual file[0] it is at glance almost similar to Latex. \begin[papersize=a4]{document} \chapter{Hi there} Hello world \include[src=chapter2] \end{document} Unfortunately, the power of Latex for maths display and vectorized graphs are completely absent. It also states image handling is still rudimentarily available (only PNG files, for example). I also am not really impressed by the type setting from the…

Two clarifications: Image handling is rudimentary at present but I'm switching to different PDF engine (see http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/166261/would-it-make-... and http://www.sile-typesetter.org/2014/09/24/Whats-happening-in...) which will vastly improve image support.

Yes, SILE is an acronym but to be perfectly honest I can't remember what for. I promise it was good. "Simon's Improved Layout Engine" is a backronym.

But if TeX does what you want, please use TeX. I don't see much point in "convincing" people who are happily using a piece of software which fits their needs to switch to something else which may not. Do whatever works. TeX has CTAN which is the product of many years of work, and it'll be a long time before SILE can even "compete" on level terms with that. But I'm not interested in competing; I'm interested in being the best in a particular niche. If that happens to be useful for others, then great.

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