Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
sile-typesetter.org
Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
1–10 of 181 posts
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#2Yeah, no, I'll stick with troff, thank you.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#3Does 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".
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#4Even if LaTeX3 brought some nice things to the TeX world, TeX programming is every year lagging more and more behind modern programming languages and practices. SILE has a long way to go before it can compete with math-heavy publications made with TeX, but I think it is already a good solution for typesetting technical documentation or prose fiction.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#5Does 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".
I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#6I am really desperate for an alternative.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#7Reminds 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?
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#8It would be cool if the source code under "examples" could be viewed in the browser, rather than having to download the .sil file
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#9Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#10TeX is one of those bits of software that's so complex to replace, it'll take another few decades (and likely a few false starts) before we can get there.
The fundamentals of TeX's typesetting are amazing, but everything else is just bolted on. You'd probably want to rebuild it with its own, custom language, perhaps inspired more by modern XML/markdown rather than the old TeX language.
The biggest problem that we're going to have moving past TeX is that it's something of a standard for math representation in text. MathML never _really_ took off. Re-training millions of people skilled in typesetting math is going to be _tough_.