Re: SILE 0.9.0 is released

Hi Simon,

The SILE engine is interesting; it is small, requires little effort to install on Linux. What I like most over TeX is the native support for Unicode characters and one-time compilation. The output PDF file automatically updates itself on Evince viewer.

I can't wait for SILE's support for math formulae. I know that this feature may take you lots of time to implement, but that would be a great advance and might boost the popularity of SILE.

-- Chien

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Simon Cozens <simon@simon-cozens.org> wrote:

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