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Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

Does SILE offer any advantages when compared to LuaTeX? (http://www.luatex.org/)

LuaTeX seems to have all the same benefits, but in contrast to SILE, it also benefits from the CTAN archive.

So what's the selling point of SILE over LuaTeX?

LuaTeX gives you hooks into the TeX system to customise certain aspects of the program's behaviour. But you can't customise the core TeX algorithms. Because the whole of SILE is written in Lua, you can replace any of the core components.

For instance, grid typesetting is a known difficult problem in TeX and its derivatives, but it's very easy in SILE because you just change the way vboxes are added to the vertical list; it's about 30 lines of code.

The frames support is pretty compelling for me as well, and will be even more so as soon as balanced frames are finished.

And I wonder what the author means with "more flexible than TeX". I have never seen (except for emacs) a more flexible software than TeX. Fully programmable (although the programming language is somewhat different than the commonly used ones). And with LuaTeX, you can even use Lua to program the system (like SILE) and you can use LuaTeX as a library to create your own frontend while using the power TeX gives (glue/box model, line breaking algorithm, ...)

To me, it looks like this is a tool mainly for people who aren't already comfortable and at home in the *TeX environment. As one of those people, I'm very interested in what the syntax of this project ends up looking like. My few experiences with TeX were fairly frustrating, with multiple ways to do things (is it \bf or \textbf?) and a relatively large amount of boilerplate/magic incantations required to get a document up and running at all.

Contrast that with Markdown, where the setup is literally "type what you want in a box and we'll format it for you in a reasonable way". There are more advanced features that require a special syntax (embedded code snippets for example), but they are included in such a way that you don't have to worry about them until you need to use them, and when you do they behave like you would expect.

I know of course that TeX is incomparably more powerful than Markdown, but I don't believe that that means that the onboarding experience needs to be incomparably more complex. Easy things easy and all that.

This isn't designed for people who don't know TeX, although of course they're welcome to use it. It was designed to solve particular typesetting problems (which came up primarily in the context of typesetting Bibles, parallel texts, and especially in non-Latin alphabets) which were difficult to achieve in TeX.

According to the doc it's a less-hackish grid-based layout, apart from the usual benefits of a clean room reimplementation. But yes, in general TeX is hard to beat and I'd like to see some good comparisons about tricky stuff, especially considering that you won't switch because you find TeX' syntax to baroque…

I did get a bit more interested after I read who is writing this, as Simon Cozens is pretty well-known in Perl circles.

Just to clarify - the grid layout isn't compulsory; it's an optional package. But it's a good example of a thing which is a hard problem in TeX (http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1418/grid-system-in-l...) and an easy one in SILE.

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