6 ms·

The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine

115 points by jhoechtl 7y ago

eslaught 7y ago
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 7y ago
  What is microtype?
  - tofof 7y ago
    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 7y ago
    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 https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype?lang=en
  - stevemk14ebr 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtypography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtypography
dang 7y ago
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
- derpa 7y ago
  derp
omaranto 7y ago
No math, sadly.
- paulclinger 7y ago
  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.
ebg13 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Koshkin 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Lout[1] might also be worth a look. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)
- zweep 7y ago
  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.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Generally when you can’t discern the rational for a preference, it often means the underlying basis is associative rather than objective. That’s how most of us discern most things most of the time—a particular appearance tends to correlate with past performance. You’ve probably read a bunch of very good papers typeset in TeX.
    - zweep 7y ago
      What I mean is that, with some things like music, I can say that this recording is better than this one because the musician is playing with better dynamics, or better pacing, etc, but with two chocolate cakes from a restaurant I can only say “this one is better.” I can’t give any advice to the chefs. Typesetting is like the latter, I can say “this looks better” but can’t say “it’s because the margins are wider” or the serifs are fatter.
kragen 7y ago
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/e72aafd58f8550815cb89c0bbd6002f16771a65d#diff-726110337c775dda423f7ea2d8fdfc53 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/xvi/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlex00lidduoft/page/x... 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 7y ago
  The test example looks alright: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples/test.png 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 7y ago
    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!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
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.
twarge 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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! :)
    - twarge 7y ago
      The very first versions of TeX did fewer things, but they did them really perfectly.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      >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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
choeger 7y ago
Does it have a context-free syntax? Because this is basically the only problem with TeX: You cannot parse it.
- zweep 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
  - The_Amp_Walrus 7y ago
    Context free means that the language/program can be described using a "context free grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar. Context free grammars are more expressive than regular expressions, but less expressive than full-blown programming languages. If you've got a spare 100 or so hours and you're interested in learning more, there's a good lecture series on YouTube about this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeoMjNOGEiaRmm_vMIwUAidnQz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeo...
- ttul 7y ago
  IIRC there are DSLs that are context free and which compile down to TeX. I just can’t recall at the moment any.. it’s been years. The layout engine inside TeX is second to none. Why throw out the baby with the bath water?
  - choeger 7y ago
    I never encountered a context-free typesetting language that was as powerful as TeX. I assume it would be quite a lot of rather boring work. The main interesting design question would be how to express content and its relationships in some logical way that is distinctive from the algorithmic layouting.
monadic2 7y ago
Is this embeddable?
j88439h84 7y ago
Check out python-typesetting for another alternative. https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-typesetting https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-typesetting
virtualritz 7y ago
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/
hbbio 7y ago
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).

115 points by jhoechtl 7y ago

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 7y ago
What is microtype?
- tofof 7y ago
  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 7y ago
  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 https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype?lang=en
- stevemk14ebr 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtypography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtypography

dang 7y ago

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

derpa 7y ago
derp

omaranto 7y ago

No math, sadly.

paulclinger 7y ago
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.

ebg13 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Koshkin 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Lout[1] might also be worth a look. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)
zweep 7y ago
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.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Generally when you can’t discern the rational for a preference, it often means the underlying basis is associative rather than objective. That’s how most of us discern most things most of the time—a particular appearance tends to correlate with past performance. You’ve probably read a bunch of very good papers typeset in TeX.
  - zweep 7y ago
    What I mean is that, with some things like music, I can say that this recording is better than this one because the musician is playing with better dynamics, or better pacing, etc, but with two chocolate cakes from a restaurant I can only say “this one is better.” I can’t give any advice to the chefs. Typesetting is like the latter, I can say “this looks better” but can’t say “it’s because the margins are wider” or the serifs are fatter.

kragen 7y ago

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/e72aafd58f8550815cb89c0bbd6002f16771a65d#diff-726110337c775dda423f7ea2d8fdfc53 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/xvi/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlex00lidduoft/page/x... 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 7y ago
The test example looks alright: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples/test.png 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 7y ago
  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!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago

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.

twarge 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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! :)
  - twarge 7y ago
    The very first versions of TeX did fewer things, but they did them really perfectly.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

choeger 7y ago

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

zweep 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- The_Amp_Walrus 7y ago
  Context free means that the language/program can be described using a "context free grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar. Context free grammars are more expressive than regular expressions, but less expressive than full-blown programming languages. If you've got a spare 100 or so hours and you're interested in learning more, there's a good lecture series on YouTube about this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeoMjNOGEiaRmm_vMIwUAidnQz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeo...
ttul 7y ago
IIRC there are DSLs that are context free and which compile down to TeX. I just can’t recall at the moment any.. it’s been years. The layout engine inside TeX is second to none. Why throw out the baby with the bath water?
- choeger 7y ago
  I never encountered a context-free typesetting language that was as powerful as TeX. I assume it would be quite a lot of rather boring work. The main interesting design question would be how to express content and its relationships in some logical way that is distinctive from the algorithmic layouting.

monadic2 7y ago

Is this embeddable?

j88439h84 7y ago

Check out python-typesetting for another alternative. https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-typesetting https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/python-typesetting

virtualritz 7y ago

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/

hbbio 7y ago

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).