Here are a few interesting things that have been going on lately. If you are interested in SILE, you should probably try using SILE from the repository head.

• Support has been added for OpenType features! SILE now supports all your historic ligatures, swash characters, stylistic sets, kerning, fractions, diacritics, CJK shaping and character width, and any other clever things that your font can do.

• A subtle but pernicious bug in the line-breaking engine has been fixed! This only manifested itself when centering paragraphs. Previously, centered paragraphs would fill from the final line upwards, leaving a few orphaned words on the first line. Now, it correctly fills from the first line down.

• Support has been added for compiling with older versions of autotools, libpng and so on; if you couldn’t get SILE to compile before, you should now.

• SILE originally supported Lua version 5.1, but after adding compatibility for 5.2, main development broke 5.1. 5.1 compatibility has been restored, so SILE now works on both versions.

• Simon gave a talk to the FOSDEM conference explaining SILE’s development and design philosophy. We’ll post the video as soon as it’s available.