Re: SILE 0.9.0 is released

[Simon Cozens <simon@...>]

On 01/09/2014 23:45, Paul Merrell wrote:
> Hi, Simon. I looked around a bit. Seems like quite the effort.

Thanks Paul! This was my third typesetting engine, I'm quite used to them by 
now. ;-)

> 1. Does SILE require UTF8 input?

SILE's text processing is "clean", in that it passes your input straight to 
Pango to be shaped. I think Pango expects UTF8, however, so if you have 
non-Latin characters that you want to typeset, you need to ensure that your 
input is in UTF8. If you're not typesetting anything non-Latin, no problem 
anyway. I've successfully tested it with Thai and Greek texts.

> 2. I didn't run across any information about which version of Lua is a
> dependency.

Sorry, yes: 5.1.

> Suggestion 1:  The readme omits mention of the potential need to
> install LuaRocks and where to get it. My impression is that you may
> have inadvertently over-estimated some of your potential users'
> familiarity with the Lua ecosystem. :-)

Yeah, most of the questions I've had so far have been luarocks related - in 
particular, external modules either not installing properly, the rocks servers 
being down, or external modules changing their interface under me and breaking 
my code, which is needless to say somewhat frustrating.

I've updated the readme for both of these issues.

> Suggestion 2: The custom on this list when doing a product initial
> release or update announcement is to prepend "[ANN] " in the subject
> line. Also on the LuaRocks list. There's no documentation of that
> anywhere handy that I know of.

Sorry about that.

Simon