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Comment by drekipus | Hacker News Reader

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drekipus·

Reminds me of reportlab, which I loathe only because of their lack of documentation.

Typesetting is hard. But at this point why not use semantic html and a specially crafted css?

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For computer-generated documents like invoices, that is totally the way to go.

Sile will take Docbook XML as an input format. Close enough?

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

Yes, I think Sile has a lot of promise but it really needs some work done to bring these features up to scratch for end users. And inevitably volunteer time is in short supply...

Actually it just takes XML as an input format, but depending on your XML you need to provide a class that defines how to typeset each tag. For Docbook SILE has an example class with about 40% of the possible tags defined to something sensible. If you want to typeset Docbook you'd need to round that out to cover your use case. To date it is only supplied as an example of how to process XML.

MathML is not even supported in browsers these days

Either KaTeX or MathJax has stepped in to support mathematical notation on the web.

https://katex.org https://www.mathjax.org

That rather depends on your choice of browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML#Browser_support

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