[HN Gopher] The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
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The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
Author : jhoechtl
Score : 55 points
Date : 2020-02-22 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| twarge wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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 is full of
| egregious typographical sins), but https://github.com/sile-
| typesetter/sile/commit/e72aafd58f855... (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...
| contains about 20x as much text) seems to be missing most of the
| definitions and doesn't even look that good. The first entry,
| aden, defined by Liddell & Scott as "to one's fill" with 12 lines
| of elaboration, reads simply, "aden adv. .".
|
| That's probably just a bug or something, but I am therefore
| unfortunately unable to soften my criticism with such a
| compliment.
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| The test example looks alright: https://github.com/sile-
| typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples...
|
| The kerning doesn't look great, but that's the fonts (DejaVu
| Sans + Libertine AFAICT).
| kragen wrote:
| 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!
| choeger wrote:
| Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the
| only problem with TeX: You cannot parse it.
| omaranto wrote:
| No math, sadly.
| [deleted]
| eslaught wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What is microtype?
| tofof wrote:
| 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."
| eslaught wrote:
| I'm using it as a shorthand for the features provided by
| LaTeX's microtype package, namely proper kerning, protrusion,
| and expansion:
|
| https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype?lang=en
| stevemk14ebr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtypography
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Related from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8392653
|
| A bit from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411446
| ebg13 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| zweep wrote:
| How is TeX terrible? I'd appreciate it if you could calibrate
| your response roughly to my level of discernment, which is to
| perceive LaTeX documents as better looking than Microsoft Word,
| but not be able to articulate why, or have much finer grained
| resolution than that.
| [deleted]
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