Version v0.14.8 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
If you have extra cake in storage just waiting for something worth celebrating, this might be a good release to bust it out for. Khaled Hosny has contributed a major new feature: support for variable fonts! This contribution was supported by a bounty grant from the MFEK Foundation. Many thanks to both Khaled and Fredrick Brennan for making this possible.
Enabling this significant step forward requires the font instancing support introduced in HarfBuzz 6 (part of the harfbuzz-subset library).
This is a new default minimum requirement for SILE.
At the time of writing this is relatively new, although many platforms already have updates available.
It is possible to build against older HarfBuzz versions by using the configuration option --disable-font-variations.
When built this way SILE will continue to run on platforms with old HarfBuzz releases but will throw an error if you attempt to render a document using variable font features.
Features
- build: Pass build time configuration into Lua environment (c5d8789)
- core: Add variations support to font command (a37e7bc)
- shapers: Instanciate variable fonts (d50881f)
- shapers: Support named instances with FontConfig (29119b9)
- shapers: Support named instances with macfonts (39a3242)