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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

#41

Post by rodw »

zvrba wrote: 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.

For a trivial but high-visibility example, the very first two paragraphs of the document have "orphaned" words on the last line--a big typographical no-no.

In the first paragraph, the orphaned word is "of". If there's no way to squeeze those three characters ("of.") into the preceding lines then one should probably be a little more generous with the character spacing in the second line so that the "of." doesn't look so lonely.

It is possible that as it happens there is no clean way to format that paragraph, or that Sile simply prioritizes other factors over orphan lines, but for a paragraph that opens with "SILE is a typesetting system. Its job is to produce beautiful printed documents.", leaving three characters orphaned on the final line is unfortunate. If nothing else I'd reword the paragraph to address this problem.

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

#42

Post by peatmoss »

hbbio wrote: post #29
zvrba wrote: 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 rendering of another open source project in the "TeX-made-after-Y2K" category, Patoline, is much more appealing: http://patoline.org/patobook.pdf

One of the more interesting features to me was the "document zippers" that lets you programmatically navigate the doc as you might a tree structure in many functional languages.

In addition, the output is certainly more convincing at this time.

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

#43

Post by aethertap »

zvrba wrote: 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.

If you take a look at the home page [1], he says he's having problems with the cairo pdf library not supporting things he wants, so that may be the source of this (he does mention letter spacing specifically).

1. http://www.sile-typesetter.org/index.html

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

#44

Post by hawkw »

zvrba wrote: 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.

Footnote typesetting is abominable, too.

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

#45

Post by Trufa »

MrDosu wrote: post #31
matthewmacleod wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about "Idle HN commentator wastes time mocking other people's work instead of offering any constructive input at all." Seriously. There are no claims about 'revolutionising' anything, just some comparisons with existing software.

The only comparison is the block level layout and then it goes into claims about being better then TeX and InDesign without offering any feature besides "scripted in a different language". The OP does not even begin to understand the complexities involved in the named software to make their featureset happen. Look at the SILE codebase, its amateur hour... Things like this are fun little hobbyist practice.

> Fun little hobbyists

http://search.cpan.org/~simon/

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596004569.do

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Perl-Programmer-Simon-Cozens...

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

#47

Post by StefanKarpinski »

I'm a little surprised that both SILE and Patoline [1] both seem to stick with the TeX formatting tradition of \begin{foo} ... \end{foo}. Is this really the best way to express layout? Or is this so that users will feel comfortable with new systems? I would have thought that taking a cue from some of the markup systems like Markdown, ReStructuredText, ASCIIDoc, etc. might have been a consideration. Just curious about this design choice.

[1] http://patoline.org/

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

#48

Post by theoh »

StefanKarpinski wrote: post #47

I'm a little surprised that both SILE and Patoline [1] both seem to stick with the TeX formatting tradition of \begin{foo} ... \end{foo}. Is this really the best way to express layout? Or is this so that users will feel comfortable with new systems? I would have thought that taking a cue from some of the markup systems like Markdown, ReStructuredText, ASCIIDoc, etc. might have been a consideration. Just curious about…

One markup language is much the same as another. The real issue here is the fact that typography is not inherently easy to specify in a serial language. It's an intuitive, visual activity, for which direct manipulation and WYSIWYG are ideal. Any non-trivial layout contains both typographic hierarchy and spatial hierarchy, grid systems and the like. Knuth blazed an important trail but you couldn't typeset a magazine in TeX. It's all very well to scratch one's own itch, of course. It is just that the specfication of layouts is a more complex, intuitive and holistic problem than TeX-like languages acknowledge. You need to be able to work with intrinsically visual and spatial things like clip paths, not to mention checking optically for rivers etc. It seems to be common for a certain kind of programmer to be detail-oriented when it comes to coding but tone deaf to the richness of typography as craft. Grrr.

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

#49

Post by rspeer »

hbbio wrote: post #29
zvrba wrote: 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 rendering of another open source project in the "TeX-made-after-Y2K" category, Patoline, is much more appealing: http://patoline.org/patobook.pdf

Hmm. Patoline sounds cool, but in that book, I have a lot of trouble distinguishing text from code. They don't put a box or even whitespace around code blocks.
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