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Sile, a typesetting system inspired by TeX and InDesign

sile-typesetter.org

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

#4

Post by patrickg »

vog wrote: 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?

And I wonder what the author means with "more flexible than TeX". I have never seen (except for emacs) a more flexible software than TeX. Fully programmable (although the programming language is somewhat different than the commonly used ones). And with LuaTeX, you can even use Lua to program the system (like SILE) and you can use LuaTeX as a library to create your own frontend while using the power TeX gives (glue/box model, line breaking algorithm, ...)

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

#6

Post by mhd »

vog wrote: 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 Perl circles.

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

#8

Post by kcorbitt »

vog wrote: 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 document up and running at all.

Contrast that with Markdown, where the setup is literally "type what you want in a box and we'll format it for you in a reasonable way". There are more advanced features that require a special syntax (embedded code snippets for example), but they are included in such a way that you don't have to worry about them until you need to use them, and when you do they behave like you would expect.

I know of course that TeX is incomparably more powerful than Markdown, but I don't believe that that means that the onboarding experience needs to be incomparably more complex. Easy things easy and all that.

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