Skip to content
0:00 / 0:00

#sile#tex#latex

Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System

lathosjp

27 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2021.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

5.3K views11 years ago2 recommendations

Systems programmingSoftware designRenderingOpen source

How SILE, a modern typesetting system inspired by TeX, uses frame-based layouts, Unicode, and Lua extensibility.

Talk given at FOSDEM 2015 in Belgium SILE is a system for creating beautiful printed documents. It borrows extensively from TeX, but brings some of TeX's ideas into the 21st century with frame-based layouts, native support for Unicode, PDF, Opentype and XML processing, and extensibility and programmability in a modern, high-level language.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an entertaining and informative introduction to SILE, a modern Lua-based alternative to TeX and LaTeX.

akavelon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Brian Kernighan on the Typesetting of “The Go Programming Language” Book”

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.: link link link link link link 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." link to this video

lahcim8on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Finl is not LaTeX”

…also thinking about TeX's internals, also because I feel the pain points you describe in at link . I have too thought about experimenting with TeX rewrites/alternatives and particularly in Rust. I don't know if you are aware, but finl has been also submitted to Lobsters ( link ). One of the comments mentions SILE ( link ). I looked into it ( link to this video was nice introduction, although I don't know how up to date it is). It seems to me that SILE replaces many pain points in TeX, while being somewhat close to LuaTeX (and TeX in general), due to use of similiar components (Lua, alogorithms, hyphenation patters, libraries). It even supports "LaTeX" like input syntax, but frankly I don't think…

gkyaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “SILE Typesetting System”

Yes, it made me recall this, though I first saw it in FOSDEM '15 talks 1. I thought it'd be nice to see what people think about this as I'm in the looks for a TeX alternative. 1 link to this video

svaton Hacker News • Mentions

On “LuaTeX Comes of Age (2017)”

…link ), and, additionally, hooks are added: callbacks that can be written in Lua, and which have access to the internal data structures. (By the way, SILE is a separate typesetting system (unrelated to TeX) that is actually written in Lua, and re-implements some of the TeX algorithms in Lua, I think. You can see this talk by its author about it: link to this video )…

svaton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX”

A couple of the author's talks are also online: • link to this video FOSDEM 2015, "Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System" • link GRANSHAN Conference 2015, "Global typesetting with SILE"