Re: SILE 0.9.0 is released

[Simon Cozens <simon@...>]

On 01/09/2014 17:51, Andrew Starks wrote:
> Render to bitmaps? What does that workflow look like?

Thanks Andrew! No direct support for rendering to bitmaps but adding it is
super easy:
1) Familiarise yourself with core/cairo-output.lua
2) Create a SILE.outputters.cairoBitmap which subclasses 
SILE.outputters.cairo, overriding the init, newpage and finish methods.
3) SILE.outputter = SILE.outputters.cairoBitmap
4) That's it.

> Vector graphics
> (something like PGF/ TikZ, also heavily Lua-based)?

That would be quite fun, wouldn't it? You have the Cairo drawing primitives
available, and the cassowary constraint solver, so you can do some really 
interesting stuff with this. I look forward to seeing your packages!

> Thoughts about bridging to
> / from the CTAN packages world? Thoughts on how it compares to ConTeX (and to
> a lesser extent LaTeX 3)...

In a way I wish I hadn't mentioned TeX, but that's the easiest way for people 
to get a handle on what SILE does. :-) I don't think that CTAN support is 
going to be possible because this deliberately *isn't* a TeX; it's a different 
typesetting system. Even though there's a lot of good stuff on CTAN, actually 
I think there's quite a lot to be gained from breaking compatibility and 
moving on. TeX's macro language is one of its least pleasant features; nobody 
wants to be programming in TeX if they don't have to!

S