4 ms·

I have looked at the PDF manual linked to from the homepage. If that PDF is produced bye Sile itself, I'm not impressed because the rendered text looks crowded.

by zvrba 12y ago

I have looked at the PDF manual linked to from the homepage. If that PDF is produced bye Sile itself, I'm not impressed because the rendered text looks crowded. Perhaps the choice of the font is at fault, perhaps the engine lacks TeX's font kerning, perhaps.. Whatever the reason, the output is IMO ugly.

carlob 12y ago
The manual shows about 80 characters per line. It should be around 66 for optimal readability. One of the things I like about LaTeX is that you don't have to know about this stuff, and since it's not entirely trivial to change the page margins it's really hard for a novice to make such a mistake.
- efaref 12y ago
  It can't even get consistent line spacing in the table of contents. See http://imgur.com/ejg2FTS http://imgur.com/ejg2FTS
  - agos 12y ago
    skimmed briefly. page 16 has four words in it.
    - a3_nm 12y ago
      The header font changes randomly as well (compare pages numbered 48 and 50, actually 52 and 54 in the document).
maaarghk 12y ago
I agree, I opened that PDF and the first page has two off-centre lines... not particularly impressed. And the line heights and kerning are all over the place. It's actually straight up terrible. Sorry, OP.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  The design issues with this manual do not necessarily detract from the technical capabilities of this new system. But it's bad advertising of course.
  - gknoy 12y ago
    Thank you for the gentle reminder that we might be well-served to examine more than the output. It is v0.9.0, after all. It was easy to say, "what is this!?" and start looking to find bugs/mistakes, when what's more interesting (to me) are the (planned?) placement of its capabilities with respect to InDesign and TeX.
robot_scream 12y ago
I agree, doesn't look attractive. Spacing is off and text is waaay to close to the image in the example here: http://imgur.com/udshoSy http://imgur.com/udshoSy
adrianmsmith 12y ago
Agreed; look at section 2.1 of the documentation: - There are two sections demarked with horizontal lines, but the upper one is further to right right. - The horizontal lines spill over into the right margin on the first one. - There is an unreasonable amount of space above and below the second one. - The paragraph "To begin with" looks stranded; it's indented because the rule is no doubt all apart from the first paragraph must be indented but it looks strange in this case.
hbbio 12y ago
The rendering of another open source project in the "TeX-made-after-Y2K" category, Patoline, is much more appealing: http://patoline.org/patobook.pdf http://patoline.org/patobook.pdf
- peatmoss 12y ago
  One of the more interesting features to me was the "document zippers" that lets you programmatically navigate the doc as you might a tree structure in many functional languages. In addition, the output is certainly more convincing at this time.
- rspeer 12y ago
  Hmm. Patoline sounds cool, but in that book, I have a lot of trouble distinguishing text from code. They don't put a box or even whitespace around code blocks.
rodw 12y ago
For a trivial but high-visibility example, the very first two paragraphs of the document have "orphaned" words on the last line--a big typographical no-no. In the first paragraph, the orphaned word is "of". If there's no way to squeeze those three characters ("of.") into the preceding lines then one should probably be a little more generous with the character spacing in the second line so that the "of." doesn't look so lonely. It is possible that as it happens there is no clean way to format that paragraph, or that Sile simply prioritizes other factors over orphan lines, but for a paragraph that opens with "SILE is a typesetting system. Its job is to produce beautiful printed documents.", leaving three characters orphaned on the final line is unfortunate. If nothing else I'd reword the paragraph to address this problem.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Well, they claim that is splits line just like TEX, so maybe it was just an unfortunate mix of wording and font.
aethertap 12y ago
If you take a look at the home page [1], he says he's having problems with the cairo pdf library not supporting things he wants, so that may be the source of this (he does mention letter spacing specifically). 1. http://www.sile-typesetter.org/index.html http://www.sile-typesetter.org/index.html
hawkw 12y ago
Footnote typesetting is abominable, too.

by zvrba 12y ago

carlob 12y ago

The manual shows about 80 characters per line. It should be around 66 for optimal readability. One of the things I like about LaTeX is that you don't have to know about this stuff, and since it's not entirely trivial to change the page margins it's really hard for a novice to make such a mistake.

efaref 12y ago
It can't even get consistent line spacing in the table of contents. See http://imgur.com/ejg2FTS http://imgur.com/ejg2FTS
- agos 12y ago
  skimmed briefly. page 16 has four words in it.
  - a3_nm 12y ago
    The header font changes randomly as well (compare pages numbered 48 and 50, actually 52 and 54 in the document).

maaarghk 12y ago

I agree, I opened that PDF and the first page has two off-centre lines... not particularly impressed. And the line heights and kerning are all over the place. It's actually straight up terrible. Sorry, OP.

andreasvc 12y ago
The design issues with this manual do not necessarily detract from the technical capabilities of this new system. But it's bad advertising of course.
- gknoy 12y ago
  Thank you for the gentle reminder that we might be well-served to examine more than the output. It is v0.9.0, after all. It was easy to say, "what is this!?" and start looking to find bugs/mistakes, when what's more interesting (to me) are the (planned?) placement of its capabilities with respect to InDesign and TeX.

robot_scream 12y ago

I agree, doesn't look attractive. Spacing is off and text is waaay to close to the image in the example here: http://imgur.com/udshoSy http://imgur.com/udshoSy

adrianmsmith 12y ago

Agreed; look at section 2.1 of the documentation: - There are two sections demarked with horizontal lines, but the upper one is further to right right. - The horizontal lines spill over into the right margin on the first one. - There is an unreasonable amount of space above and below the second one. - The paragraph "To begin with" looks stranded; it's indented because the rule is no doubt all apart from the first paragraph must be indented but it looks strange in this case.

hbbio 12y ago

The rendering of another open source project in the "TeX-made-after-Y2K" category, Patoline, is much more appealing: http://patoline.org/patobook.pdf http://patoline.org/patobook.pdf

peatmoss 12y ago
One of the more interesting features to me was the "document zippers" that lets you programmatically navigate the doc as you might a tree structure in many functional languages. In addition, the output is certainly more convincing at this time.
rspeer 12y ago
Hmm. Patoline sounds cool, but in that book, I have a lot of trouble distinguishing text from code. They don't put a box or even whitespace around code blocks.

rodw 12y ago

For a trivial but high-visibility example, the very first two paragraphs of the document have "orphaned" words on the last line--a big typographical no-no. In the first paragraph, the orphaned word is "of". If there's no way to squeeze those three characters ("of.") into the preceding lines then one should probably be a little more generous with the character spacing in the second line so that the "of." doesn't look so lonely. It is possible that as it happens there is no clean way to format that paragraph, or that Sile simply prioritizes other factors over orphan lines, but for a paragraph that opens with "SILE is a typesetting system. Its job is to produce beautiful printed documents.", leaving three characters orphaned on the final line is unfortunate. If nothing else I'd reword the paragraph to address this problem.

wodenokoto 12y ago
Well, they claim that is splits line just like TEX, so maybe it was just an unfortunate mix of wording and font.

aethertap 12y ago

If you take a look at the home page [1], he says he's having problems with the cairo pdf library not supporting things he wants, so that may be the source of this (he does mention letter spacing specifically). 1. http://www.sile-typesetter.org/index.html http://www.sile-typesetter.org/index.html

hawkw 12y ago

Footnote typesetting is abominable, too.