sile

I haven't used typesetting since my university days and updating my ModernCV CV, but it's also worth mentioning SILE (https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile) for modern typesetting with minimal cruft. I also found the very useful comparison website https://polytype.dev/ on the subject!

This is the most exciting feature of Sile to me -- since I currently rely on a slow and memory hungry Java toolchain to convert docbook to pdf with fop -- but I just tried it on two docbook documents (a book and also a short article) and it failed to convert both. Apparently the docbook support is currently very incomplete: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/issues/1338

Sile appears to still be under active development: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile

I love the premise and design vision of SILE, so I played with it a bit. I reported an issue with the show-off document (not the manual), and it led to an interesting discussion: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/issues/623

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

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).

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 20× as much text) seems to be missi

According to the issue someone opened (https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/issues/483), it's available at: https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/558d35d45e1fee89860...

There is also SILE (https://github.com/simoncozens/sile), which has been in development since 2012 and addresses these points in the docs: SILE is similar to TeX—from which it borrows some concepts and even syntax and algorithms—but the similarities end there. Rather than being a derivative of the TeX family SILE is a new typesetting and layout engine written from the ground up using modern technologies and borrowing some ideas from graphical systems such as InDesign. The documentation includes "SILE versus TeX" section; some of the quotes from it: "one of the things that TeX can’t do particularly well is typesetting on a grid. This is something of a must have feature for anyone typesetting bibles. Typesetting on a grid means that each line of text will line up between the front and back of each piece of paper producing much less visual b

Directly to one sample: https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/sim... The sample directory: https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/tree/master/examples

Of recent attempts at dethroning LaTeX, there's also SILE, which actually reuses some LaTeX internals. For some examples of the output (hard to find, the author seems not great at marketing), see e.g.: https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/ara... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/art... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/fra... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/par... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/jap... https://github.com/simoncozens/sile/blob/master/examples/tes... For a deeper dive, see the author's presentation at FOSDEM 2015 - I found it really amusing - from the starting line of: "I wrote a typesetting system - by mistake." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIP_N9qQm4

From the PDF manual file[0] it is at glance almost similar to Latex. \begin[papersize=a4]{document} \chapter{Hi there} Hello world \include[src=chapter2] \end{document} Unfortunately, the power of Latex for maths display and vectorized graphs are completely absent. It also states image handling is still rudimentarily available (only PNG files, for example). I also am not really impressed by the type setting from the PDF, but this might be due to its focus on the engine and not the aesthetics of the typesetting (which will hopefully addressed soon to convince Tex users!). Personally I don't "program" in Tex, I only write. The benefits with regard to (La)Tex therefore seems minor to me. However, if you program in Tex (like, designing templates perhaps?) I can understand you don't want to fool around with an ancient system like T