
Sile – Simon's Improved Layout Engine - coldtea
https://github.com/simoncozens/sile
======
haberman
I just skimmed the manual, and I love it! This is extremely similar to how I
envisioned trying to write a TeX "next generation", almost 15 years ago.

Standout features, according to me:

    
    
        - lightweight
        - built on modern technologies (TrueType fonts, PDFs)
        - high-quality output
        - lets you separate content & presentation if you want
          (XML can contain content, .sil/.lua presentation)
        - lets you create page templates that text flow onto.
          (like InDesign)
        - lets you write packages to do tricky things, and has
          validated the programming model by solving
          some legitimately hard layout problems.
    

I'm not in academia and have never found TeX's ecosystem of packages a huge
draw, so I don't think I'll miss that much.

The main thing I worry about is stability of interfaces. If people start
writing documents and packages that target this, will they continue to work in
the future? Is the developer committing to that?

Overall I'm really excited to see this!

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nerdponx
The things that make TeX and its offspring so sticky are:

    
    
        - amazing library availability
        - decent quality purpose-built tooling 
        - massive online support community
        - endlessly extensible
        - beautiful out-of-the-box math support
    

All but the latter two are out of the developers control. But the latter two
will beget the rest. What is math support like? And how easy is it to write
extensions/plugins/packages, create templates/styles, etc.?

Similarly, does it improve on some of the annoyances of using Tex? It would be
nice if I could use my system fonts for typesetting.

Another way to improve adoption would be to look into adding a reader/writer
for Pandoc, although that sounds like a complicated venture.

~~~
Silhouette
_The things that make TeX and its offspring so sticky are:_

I agree with your list, but I think you overlooked another crucial one:

TeX is one of the most remarkably bug-free and stable pieces of software ever
written.

For all its quirks, you can take a .tex file written for an academic paper 30
years ago, and you can run it through a modern TeX implementation today, and
there's a good chance that your output will be identical for all practical
purposes. Just about everything about TeX and its supporting infrastructure is
rigorously specified, robustly implemented, and of course incredibly well
documented.

In the era of moving fast, breaking things and pretending it doesn't matter,
many dev teams could learn a great deal from TeX's priorities. Given the
momentum behind the TeX world now, I suspect that anyone who wants to offer a
more modern alternative is going to have to clear that bar as well (and I hope
this project does, because it seems to have a lot going for it in other
respects).

~~~
qznc
If you use pure TeX, yes. However, most people use LaTeX and a lot of
packages. Those break all the time.

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mastax
Perhaps a better link: [http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/](http://sile-
typesetter.org/what-is/)

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amelius
Does it support complicated things like sharing baselines between arbitrarily
complicated box structures which are positioned side by side?

~~~
coldtea
Does it matter?

~~~
trynewideas
For being pitched against InDesign, yes. Document, page, and per-frame
baseline grid alignment is a standard feature in InDesign and Quark. Scribus
and even Publisher do document-wide baseline alignment.

------
th0br0
Sadly, the show-off link doesn't work.

~~~
BoppreH
According to the issue someone opened
([https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/issues/483](https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/issues/483)),
it's available at:

[https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/558d35d45e1fee89860...](https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/558d35d45e1fee89860d51680563735e076a78e5/examples/showoff.pdf)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Not to rain on their parade, but... sweet Jesus, the leading, kerning and
tracking in that show-off pdf is absolutely abysmal!

No ligatures, apparently no math support whatsoever, no support for floating
figures, no cross-references, no bibliographies, no table of content, no
tables even...

Apart from printing bibles (which they mention), I'm having a hard time seeing
where this is an improvement over TeX for the end user. Also strange that
their comparison with (luaLa)TeX doesn't mention ConTeXt.

~~~
theoh
Aside from unfortunate aesthetic, and puzzling practical issues (like no
attempt to replicate TeX's math support), something about the overall tone of
the docs and Cozens' web presence would discourage me from making an
investment of time in one of his projects. YMMV.

Jeffrey Kingston's Lout was a more convincing experiment but it's sadly no
longer adequate for complex or multilingual work, due to limitations in the
90s implementation.

~~~
SwellJoe
_" something about the overall tone of the docs and Cozens' web presence would
discourage me from making an investment of time in one of his projects."_

I'm not sure I understand that assumption. He's been around the OSS community
for decades (wrote some O'Reilly books about Perl, and wrote quite a few Perl
modules, though that was more than a decade ago, and I dunno what he's been up
to since). I do find the github a little sparse, but there is a website for
SILE, which is better: [http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/](http://sile-
typesetter.org/what-is/)

It looks like a personal project, rather than a "take over the world" attack
on TeX. Seems like if it's an area that's interesting for someone, they might
want to have a look. It does have some novel ideas over TeX, and is maybe more
modern in some of its implementation details, even if it is nowhere near as
complete or mature as LaTeX.

------
oconnor0
The Sile PDF says

> There is no shortcut for boldface, because boldface isn’t good typographic
> practice and so we don’t want to make it easy for you to make bad books.

Where/what is that from? Like is that common "knowledge"?

~~~
kuschku
Not really. Generally, ALL CAPS and italic are preferred over bold (as both
are specially cut for that, and keep the contrast roughly the same), but bold
is not bad either (and for sans serif, always choose bold over italic).
Compare with: [http://practicaltypography.com/bold-or-
italic.html](http://practicaltypography.com/bold-or-italic.html)

What you definitely shouldn’t do is underlining, though:
[http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html](http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html)

~~~
dmitrygr
Both of your links redirect to:
[http://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html](http://practicaltypography.com/graylist.html),
which lacks useful content

~~~
eridius
Maybe that's a random redirect? Both of the original links work just fine for
me.

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petters
What is the compilation speed? Tex and its derivatives are really slow.
(Whereas e.g. Web browsers typeset documents in milliseconds)

~~~
fish_fan
> Web browsers typeset documents in milliseconds)

Well, poorly. Try printing a site out.

~~~
petters
> Well, poorly

Agreed. I shouldn't have included that line.

