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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

My goal with finl is not to re-create TeX but to reimagine it. The macro-oriented programming language is a big pain point, as are the whole concept of category codes. In many instances, LaTeX is still hemmed in by the constraints of ca 1980 computing technology. If you look through tex.web, you'll see things like weird string concatenations that were done in order to save a handful of bytes of memory. It was a radical change to TeX in the 80s to move to 32-bit addressing for the main memory array from 16-bit addressing. And Unicode support is occasionally weird, particularly in the incompatibilities between how ^^ literals are managed in pdfTeX vs XeTeX/LuaTeX (in the former, ^^D7 is a byte, in the latter ^^D7 is a code point and turns into a two-byte UTF sequence).

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I understand your motivation. The thing is, there were many attempts to reimagine TeX, and none of them succeeded. Not because there were bad ideas, far from that. It's a huge project requiring a significant development team.

Or one (1) Donald Knuth

Plus a huge number of TeX packages have been made and used. You can't just ask people to leave all of that and learn a new language.

The idea is that a LaTeX document and a finl document would look nearly identical between \begin{document} and \end{document}. As for packages, they fall into two categories:

* document classes. Creating document classes is too difficult with LaTeX and a new document class with finl will be a relatively trivial thing to create,

* extensions to LaTeX to remedy deficiencies. Some, like babel/polyglossia and the six million improvements on tabular would be things baked into the core format of finl. The most notable third-party ecosystem that would be translated would be the whole TikZ environment. I'm aiming to be able to allow TikZ illustrations to be cut and pasted into finl and to replicate at least the most common extensions. The other big one is the whole beamer ecosystem. The finl equivalent will keep similar if not identical syntax but will be superior in that it will be able to allow non-PDF backends for output (so, for example, one could run finl-ppt mypresentation.finl and get a PowerPoint presentation with all the capabilities that PowerPoint gives for things like animations and transitions that are difficult or impossible to achieve in a PDF-based presentation.

Recently I have been also thinking about TeX's internals, also because I feel the pain points you describe in at https://www.finl.xyz/. 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 (https://lobste.rs/s/udu5oe/finl_is_not_latex_reinventing_lat...). One of the comments mentions SILE (https://sile-typesetter.org/). I looked into it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIP_N9qQm4 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 that is the part of LaTeX I would keep :).

Can you share your opinion on SILE?

There is also Patoline[1][2], but it looks abandoned now.

[1] https://patoline.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/patoline/patoline

There is also SATySFi[1] (another typesetting system in Ocaml), it is active but mainly in japanese.

[1] https://github.com/gfngfn/SATySFi

The examples on sile’s own webpage are hardly inspiring.

Is it better than markdown, as laid out by my browser and the free pluggin, and saved to pdf? Not from those examples.

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