SILE v0.14.14 Is Released

23 Dec 2023 — Caleb Maclennan

Version v0.14.14 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

Merry Christmas!

Not this isn't the Rusty release you might want in your stocking. That is coming along nicely though, we're just including an abitioun rollup of breaking changes and going slow to do it right. You can preview the release notes or follow issues in the milestore for teasers. More notably there are already lots of ways to run the development release: Homebrew has --HEAD support, Docker images are available, the Nix flake works, Arch Linux has VCS packages, and more. If you want to start putting it through the paces go ahead.

Until the cookies are fully baked, this minor release has a few goodies that are not breaking changes. Didier Willis contributed some updates to the dropcaps package to better handle fonts with descenders in their capitals. He also contributed some improvements to Unicode handling: soft hyphen and non-breaking spaces work as expected. SILE has perhaps more robust ways of defining custom hyphenation and glue nodes, but the Unicode handling is convenient is handy if you input content has such data anyway. For bonus points some CLI error messages have been dramatically improved to be more informative and less repetative.

Features

  • cli: Change module load error to suggestion for how to install 3rd party modules (c280050)
  • languages: U+00A0 non-breaking space must be stretchable by default (b769a63)
  • typesetters: Support U+00AD soft hyphen as discretionary break (285507e)

Bug Fixes

  • backends: Fix plain text backend to work in LuaJIT/Lua 5.1 (b185d49)

  • cli: Stop outputting error messages twice on failure to process main file (da5d609)

  • core: Use nil-safe and Lua-version-robust table utils (2405b23)

  • packages: Adjust dropcap logic for letters with a depth (fd6963d)

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