After a year of development and many, many fixes, version v0.9.4 of SILE has been released and is available for download! It includes nearly 600 changes, including:

• New packages include: letter spacing, multiple line spacing methods, Japanese Ruby, font specimen generator, crop marks, font fallback, set PDF background color.

• Fixed handling of font weight and style.

• Hyphenation: Correct hyphenation of Indic scripts, words with non-alphabetic characters in them, and allow setting hyphen character and defining hyphenation exceptions.

• Relative dimensions ("1.2em") are converted to absolute dimensions at point of use, not point of declaration. So you can set linespacing to 1.2em, change font size, and it’ll still work.

• Default paper size to A4.

• Changes to semantics of percent-of-page and percent-of-frame length specifications. (width=50% etc.)

• Much improved handling of footnotes, especially in multicolumn layouts.

• Support for: the libthai line breaking library, color fonts, querying the system font library on OS X, multiple Amharic justification conventions.

• Added explicit kern nodes.

• Changed to using Harfbuzz for the text processing pipeline; much faster, and much more accurate text shaping.

• Rewritten and more accurate bidirectional handling.

• Removed dependency on FreeType; use Harfbuzz for font metrics.

• Fixed the definition of an em. (It’s not the width of a letter "m".)

and much more besides.