SILE v0.14.13 Is Released

30 Oct 2023 — Caleb Maclennan

Version v0.14.13 of SILE has been released and is available for download! See the included CHANGELOG.md or review the commit history for more explicit details.

Summary of Improvements

This minor release brings a couple improvements from a new contributor, João Quinaglia. We have one new feature, a boolean option flag on our base class that enables landscape mode. Any paper orientation has been supported already, but the preset paper sizes only had the standard portrait orientation and landscape orientations required entering custom dimensions. This flag makes it a bit easier to swap the X and Y dimensions of the standard (or custom) value parsed from the papersize option. Additionally he fixed a bug in the frametricks package such that using the \makecolumns function doesn't break relative frame constraints used by, for example, footnote or folio frames. This fix only works for TTB-LTR automatic column setups for now.

Finally, some build system fixes and features were backported from v0.15.0 development work. Most significantly the handling of the SILE_PATH environment variable now allows multiple paths, which in turn allows a single project to utilize multiple external collections of 3rd party packages rather than having to collate them all into one location.

Features

  • classes: Add landscape option to base class (#1892) (0fb9ade)
  • cli: Allow multiple runtime SILE_PATH segments (backport from develop branch) (e7c8fe2)

Bug Fixes

  • frames: Update frame constraints with new frame IDs after \makecolumns (b2d6b4f)

SILE v0.14.12 Is Released

11 Oct 2023 — Caleb Maclennan

Version v0.14.12 of SILE has been released and is available for download! See the included CHANGELOG.md or review the commit history for more explicit details.

Summary of Improvements

This is another minor maintenance release. We throw a few less warning messages having dropped a few that were not actually informative. A few memory management bugs have been fixed, most notably affecting Lua 5.1. For the most part we hope you are on LuaJIT anyway (or your system's default Lua, hopefully newer than 5.1) but we do try to keep everything working smoothly on any platform. A few other minor improvements are noted below.

In other news, the v0.15.0 release is coming soon too. It is already stable enough to be used for real work and should play nice with most systems. Issue #1864 has some notes on how to run the development branch for it before it is released.

Features

  • i18n: Add Portuguese localizations for bibtex package (#1859) (f716c35)
  • utilities: Add utility function for console messages without trace info (18526ce)

Bug Fixes

  • build: Make sure vendored luarocks isn't a phony target that runs repeatedly (713434d)

  • core: Allocate exactly what we use, not a guess with an extra just in case (640ded0)

  • core: Correct usage of HarfBuzz when passing a filtered list of shapers (f488643)

  • core: Fixup class loader so cache is all Lua module specs (#1863) (7efff5b)

  • packages: Don't warn on TOC content change if not actually used (87c443d)

SILE v0.14.11 Is Released

22 Aug 2023 — Caleb Maclennan

Version v0.14.11 of SILE has been released and is available for download! See the included CHANGELOG.md or review the commit history for more explicit details.

Summary of Improvements

Today we only fix the things we broke yesterday. This is a very minor release with only a couple of touch-ups to actual code. The biggest motivation for the release is actually the documentation. Our documentation changes don't show up in the automatic change logs, but we fixed a number of problems with the layout of the manual. Over the last couple releases we introduced several mistakes in the documentation code causing a bit of mess. The manual still isn't perfect, but at least no bits are drawn over other bits any more! Additionally a whole new chapter on how to write modules to add input and output formats landed thanks to Didier Willis.

Bug Fixes

  • core: Leave legacy masterFilename alone but use first input filename internally (29667a7)

  • core: Make masterFilename actually a filename (759131e)

  • packages: Avoid mix-and-matching indents in fixed-width specimin blocks (de41cac)

  • utilities: Use real semver parser for deprecation warnings (5f0fed5)

SILE v0.14.10 Is Released

11 Jul 2023 — Caleb Maclennan

Version v0.14.10 of SILE has been released and is available for download! See the included CHANGELOG.md or review the commit history for more explicit details.

Summary of Improvements

Not all releases bring groundbreaking changes. This one is a roll-up of bits and bops. A few small quality of live improvements, some localizations, some bug fixes, some conveniences for 3rd party package developers, and so forth. Enjoy.

Notes about the Future

If you're looking for messy fun, check out the riir branch and PR#1762. As the name suggests, this is a major project overhaul based in Rust. Have no fear! Everything is still fully customizable in Lua. We have no plans of taking away that flexibility. The current proof of concept is a CLI binary is Rust that provides it's own Lua interpreter (optionally linked to the system one or completely vendored). This normalizes the environment, allows targeting environments where Lua is hard to get running, allows parts of the system to be selectively coded in Rust for speed benefits, etc. The PoC already passes 100% of the existing tests, loads 3rd party packages as usual, and is a full drop in replacement for the current Lua based CLI. As of this writing the plan is to land this new CLI in v0.15.0, potentially enabling easy(er) installation on Windows in follow up releases.

If you are a 3rd party developer, by sure to keep an eye on your Lua support. SILE already supports Lua versions 5.1.x through 5.4.x and well as LuaJIT. The same range of support is already achievable at build time in the Rust CLI. The LuaJIT provides the usual massive improvement in speed. We plan to push for this to be the default option in distro packages in the future even on platforms where the default Lua interpreter is 5.4. Making sure your packages run under the existing LuaJIT support should future proof them to easily transition to the Rust based SILE builds.

Features

  • cli: Allow more than one input document (d20cbd8)
  • i18n: Add localized strings for Cantonese and Chinese (cb67d36)
  • packages: Add document class styling in autodoc (e70fa50)
  • packages: Provide API for registering raw handlers linked to packages (45cd3ac)

Bug Fixes

  • build: Avoid build artifacts being listed for installation (29c2ccd)

  • core: Avoid stack overflow in Harfbuzz module (#1793) (5001efe)

  • outputters: Setup --makedeps to play along without explicit --output (6ff2e16)

  • packages: Converters package no longer worked after 0.13.0 (433795c)

  • packages: Correct chord line height and chord font use (65961c6), closes #1351

SILE v0.14.9 Is Released

12 Apr 2023 — Caleb Maclennan

Version v0.14.9 of SILE has been released and is available for download! See the included CHANGELOG.md or review the commit history for more explicit details.

Summary of Improvements

Today we have a substantial rollup of small fixes. No one thing here is going to knock your socks off, but lots of things are just better.

On the documentation front a new contributor, John Labovitz, stepped in with a huge copy-edit of the entire manual.

For shiny new features, Didier Willis added a new scalebox package for reshaping other output. He also taught some existing packages new tricks, such as adding style hooks to the url package and allowing the infinitely stretchy fill glue nodes to be initialized with a starting length. The CLI gained a new --quiet flag to suppress info and warning messages for those times when you just don't want to know what the engine is telling you.

In bug extermination news, the list of squashed ones is long, and some of them had been around for a long time. Didier did a lot of work under the hood with hboxes and discretionary node handling. The upshot for end users is that a lot of weirdness with parindent settings and they way content that didn't fit on one page is pushed to the next has been smoothed over. Your indents shouldn't ever get applied twice, underlines won't apply to the indentation space, unnumbered chapters won't sometimes disappear from your ToC, and so forth.

Features

  • classes: Add Picas unit to cover all units speced in Docbook (88f03fa)
  • classes: Implement the\code command in the plain class (0d371ba)
  • cli: Add -q / --quiet flag to reduce output to essential errors (#1759) (f69ed20)
  • core: Support initializing fill glues with a width (#1765) (5bc372a)
  • packages: Introduce urlstyle hook in the url package (8f6235d)
  • packages: New scalebox package for arbitrary box re-scaling (a11f61e)
  • packages: Support migrating content in re-wrapped hboxes (da3ab6d)
  • typesetters: Implement hbox building logic in the typesetter (0f5bc69)

Bug Fixes

  • build: Distribute SVG and FTL source files in packages (7cef0ea)

  • classes: Avoid justification issues with relative parindent (3ffd272)

  • classes: Make sure un-numbered chapters make it in the ToC (e5af292)

  • classes: Parse bare number and percentage units in docbook images (8b965b9)

  • classes: Setting current.hangIndent is a measurement (e213d6e)

  • cli: Return success if --help explicitly requested (#1737) (35a229d)

  • core,typesetter: Discretionary nodes are incorrectly handled (dd7d05c)

  • core: Ensure restoring settings top-level state does not error (fce8447)

  • outputters: Update Cairo/Podofo hbox debug API to match libtexpdf (#1703) (607dcf7)

  • packages: Correct image aspect preservation logic (6ace5b1)

  • packages: Fix output of debug breaks in infonode package (#1725) (c8a1467)

  • packages: Make sure pullquotes start in block mode (#1774) (00151bc)

  • packages: Strip content position in ToC entries (#1739) (23345ea)

  • packages: Text conversion in bookmarks has spacing issues (7ef2bb4)

  • typesetter: Account for discretionary dimensions in hbox building (91cb950)

  • typesetter: Avoid initializing new line during hbox creation (ae455a1)

  • typesetter: New typesetter instances shall not reset settings (16d8a6a)

  • typesetter: Skip lines containing only discardables without ignoring next lines (9c3dc65)

  • typesetter: Top glues shall be skipped when streching/shrinking a page (8818a24)

  • typsetter: Hack around scoping issues for parindent setting (fc85298)

  • utilities: Enforce stricter type casts (SU.cast, SU.boolean) (a325eb7)