I’m proud to announce that the first public release of the SILE typesetter is now available.

What is SILE?

SILE is a typesetting system. Its job is to produce beautiful printed documents. It’s similar to TeX, but with some ideas borrowed from InDesign, and written with modern technologies in mind.

What can I do with it (that I can’t do with TeX)?

SILE allows you to

• Produce complex document layouts using frames.

• Easily extend the typesetting system in a high-level programming language. (Lua)

• Directly process XML to PDF without the use of XSL stylesheets.

• Typeset text on a grid.

Getting and installing

SILE can be downloaded from its home page, or directly from the release page.

SILE is written in the Lua programming language, so you will need a Lua version 5.1 installation; it also relies on the Cairo and Pango libraries.

You also need to install the following Lua libraries using luarocks (downloading luarocks if you do not already have it installed).

• stdlib
• lgi
• lpeg
• luaexpat
• inspect
• luaepnf
• luarepl
• cassowary

Once your dependencies are installed, run

• lua install.lua

This will place the SILE libraries and executable in a sensible location.

Now try sile examples/test.sil.

Finding out more

Please read the full SILE manual for more information about what SILE is and how it can help you.

Why is this v0.9.0?

While this release is perfectly functional for typesetting complex documents, SILE has several technical and social goals that need to be accomplished before it can be considered "v1.0". See the roadmap for more information.

Contact

Please report bugs and send patches and pull requests at the github repository. For questions, please contact the author, Simon Cozens simon@simon-cozens.org.

License terms

SILE is distributed under the MIT licence.