
The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine - jhoechtl
https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile
======
twarge
The manual seems to quickly disqualify the system. The numbers don't line up
in the TOC in horrible ways. Then a little ways down there's a wrap figure
that's got a horrible spacing problem. These indicate to me that the shiny new
foundations are really quite wobbly.

~~~
crazygringo
Wow, I thought you were exaggerating but it really is _terrible_. Page 15 of
the manual is inexplicably 90% blank too.

So it's clearly just a _super_ -rough prototype, which would be fine except
that when it brands itself as "its job is to produce beautiful printed
documents"... it gives the impression that it already does this, when the
reality is clearly far, far away.

I think the project needs to be honest about where it's at.

[1] [https://sile-typesetter.org/manual/sile-0.10.2.pdf](https://sile-
typesetter.org/manual/sile-0.10.2.pdf)

~~~
bjornjajajaja
Well it doesn’t even have a 1.0 release so that’s enough to cut them slack.

For instance, the foundation of the house is most critical but when everyone
looks at the foundation and asks, “where’s the house? This house can’t be much
they brand themselves as a beautiful château but all it is is a big hole in
the ground...”

A project like this is no minor task! :)

~~~
marcinzm
>Well it doesn’t even have a 1.0 release so that’s enough to cut them slack.

I mean, it's at 3000+ commits and 5+ years so it's not exactly a new project.
There's something to be said for doing fewer things but doing them really
well.

------
kragen
I admit I'm prejudiced by the author beginning the README by boasting about
how "beautiful" their own creation is, but I'm dismayed at the thought of
trying to do preservation and archival work on documents whose rendering
changes every time Harfbuzz has a mandatory security update.

I was hoping to be able to soften this criticism by saying "at least it looks
better than the output of the last layout engine I wrote", which would not be
a hard bar to clear
([http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf](http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf)
is full of egregious typographical sins), but [https://github.com/sile-
typesetter/sile/commit/e72aafd58f855...](https://github.com/sile-
typesetter/sile/commit/e72aafd58f8550815cb89c0bbd6002f16771a65d#diff-726110337c775dda423f7ea2d8fdfc53)
(Liddell & Scott, I would have thought? Although it has no title page, table
of contents, or even headwords, and
[https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlex00lidduoft/page/x...](https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlex00lidduoft/page/xvi/mode/2up)
contains about 20× as much text) seems to be missing most of the definitions
and doesn't even look that good. The first entry, αδην, defined by Liddell &
Scott as "to one's fill" with 12 lines of elaboration, reads simply, "αδην
adv. .". (Except with the proper diacritics, of course.)

That's probably just a bug or something, but I am therefore unfortunately
unable to soften my criticism with such a compliment.

~~~
Mathnerd314
The test example looks alright: [https://github.com/sile-
typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples...](https://github.com/sile-
typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples/test.png)

The kerning doesn't look great, but that's the fonts (DejaVu Sans + Libertine
AFAICT).

~~~
kragen
The test example literally has a double hyphen "\--" in place of an em dash,
which begins a line, provoking an unjustified momentary appearance of being an
utterance by a character quoted in the French or Spanish style; and the
author's name in body-text type right-aligned at the top of the page looks
like a typographical error. Still, it's eminently readable, with reasonable
hyphenation. My typographical sins in the PDF rendering of Dercuano were, in
many cases, far worse (no hyphenation at all!), but I hacked together
Dercuano's PDF renderer in 5 days as a last resort, and I don't claim that the
result is "beautiful", although I wish it were.

Thank you helping me be slightly less of an arrogant jerk!

~~~
munificent
The faux em dash definitely caught my eye. The hyphenated "ory" on its own
line at the end of a paragraph is another really bad look.

If these are the examples to pitch the system... it doesn't seem ready for
primetime. That's OK. Every project has to start somewhere, but the README
could stand to frame that a little better.

~~~
kragen
Yeah, I wouldn't want to influence the author to stop working on typesetting,
but I found the arrogant boasting really annoying.

------
ebg13
I think TeX is terrible, so keep it up please, but the examples all look
really bad. If you want to sell someone on "this system will help you make
_beautiful_ documents", the examples need to wow.

~~~
Koshkin
Not sure if TeX is “terrible” or not, but the syntax here looks very similar.

On a practical note, it may be worth exploring other options: groff and
TeXMacs (no affiliation with TeX or emacs).

~~~
mhd
Lout[1] might also be worth a look.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_\(software\))

------
PaulDavisThe1st
Is there a bug bounty program for SILE? Does the payout double for every bona
fide bug reported?

I'm sympathetic to the motivations that would lead someone to write a new
typesetting engine. The problem is that in terms of essentially bug-free
behavior and being completely understood and documented, TeX sets a bar that,
despite its age and certain kind of clunky, is very, very high.

------
dang
Related from 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392653)

A bit from 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411446)

------
eslaught
The first thing I want to know about a typesetting system is: does it do
microtype? And are there any innovations at that level? I don't see any
mention of this in the "SILE vs TeX" section of the manual, but to me it seems
like the most important thing I'd need to know up front. After all, if I'm not
going to put in the effort to make a document look _really_ good, why bother
with a typesetting system at all?

Practically speaking, I think if they wanted users to adopt this, the best
thing they could do would be to write an output format for Pandoc or similar.
I could try this today if such a mode were available.

~~~
mixmastamyk
What is microtype?

~~~
tofof
I believe it's referring to small intercharacter typesetting details like
tracking and kerning.

From the microtype package for latex:

"The microtype package provides a LaTeX interface to the micro-typographic
extensions ... : most prominently, character protrusion and font expansion,
furthermore the adjustment of interword spacing and additional kerning, as
well as hyphenatable letterspacing (tracking) and the possibility to disable
all or selected ligatures."

------
choeger
Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the only problem
with TeX: You cannot parse it.

~~~
zweep
What does context-free syntax mean? And what does “you cannot parse it” mean?
Meaning you can’t stream it, you need the whole file first?

~~~
CJefferson
Tex is like a programming language, you have to "run" the program to generate
output, and that execution is tightly tied to producing output on paper pages.
This means it is extremely difficult to produce good looking HTML, or
accessible output.

------
j88439h84
Check out python-typesetting for another alternative.

[https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-
typesetting](https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-typesetting)

------
virtualritz
I went to the the website and looked at [1]. Both examples there show complete
lack of understanding of typography and typesetting. I don't even know where
to start.

Tex is no fun to use but this system is years away from being an alternative.

[https://sile-typesetter.org/examples/](https://sile-typesetter.org/examples/)

------
omaranto
No math, sadly.

~~~
paulclinger
There are several tickets related to math handling. See
[https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/pull/578](https://github.com/sile-
typesetter/sile/pull/578) and other tickets referenced there.

------
hbbio
See also a previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13674879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13674879)
for Patoline, another LaTeX alternative (written in OCaml).

------
monadic2
Is this embeddable?

