SILE v0.9.4 Is Released

31 Aug 2016 — Simon Cozens

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.

Snake Justification

04 May 2016 — Simon Cozens

(Note: This blog post was edited when the proof of concept example was moved from a package in an unreleased branch to this website’s example section.)

The ever-excellent xkcd has produced a table of full-width justification strategies:

XKCD

Naturally, SILE can support snake-based justification. Check out the code in the “Snake Justification” example on this site. You can see the result in PDF form here, and it looks like this:

snake-justification

Because SILE is an extremely flexible typesetting engine, this took less than 20 lines of Lua code to implement.

We have been doing lots of other SILE development too, but snakes are fun.

SILE Is Now In Homebrew

26 Jun 2015 — Simon Cozens

For users on OS X, SILE has been added to the homebrew package manager. This means that the easiest way to install SILE is now:

  • Install homebrew from the web site
  • Run brew install sile
  • You’re done

SILE v0.9.2 Is Released

03 Jun 2015 — Simon Cozens

Version v0.9.2 of SILE has been released and is available for download.

  • New packages for: rotated content, accessing OpenType features and ligatures, alternative input of Unicode characters, PDF bookmarks and links, input transformation.

  • Packages to help with typesetting chord sheets and bibles.

  • Experimental packages for bibliography management, typesetting URLs, Japanese vertical typesetting, balanced columns, and best-fit page breaking.

  • Support for quoted strings in the parameters to TeX-like commands.

  • Language support: Many fixes to Arabic; support for Tibetan and Kannada; hyphenation for many languages; much improved bidirectional typesetting.

  • Warn when frames are overfull.

  • Support for older versions of autotools, for Lua 5.3 and mingw32 environments.

  • Continuous integration and testing framework

  • Fixes to long-standing bugs in grid support, centering, ligatures, insertions and page breaking.

  • Better font handling and substitution.

  • Valid PDFs will still be generated on error/interruption.

  • Improved error handling and error messages.

  • Many miscellaneous bug fixes.

What’s Happening In SILE Development Valentines Edition

14 Feb 2015 — Simon Cozens

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.