Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System

A couple of the author's talks are also online: • ▶ this video [FOSDEM 2015, "Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System"] • link [GRANSHAN Conference 2015, "Global typesetting with SILE"]

> Furthermore, the effort to rewrite as much of the TeX implementation as possible in Lua is perplexing. Very little of the TeX implementation has been rewritten in Lua. (Assuming you're talking of LuaTeX itself and not the "TeX without TeX" wiki page, which is just for demonstration.) LuaTeX starts with the WEB (Pascal) code of TeX, manually translated into C (see e.g. link ), and, additionally, hooks are added: callbacks that can be written in Lua, and which have access to the internal data structures. (By the way, SILE is a separate typesetting system (unrelated to TeX) that is actually written in Lua, and re-implements some of the TeX algorithms in Lua, I think. You can see this talk by its author about it: ▶ this video )

Recently I have been also thinking about TeX's internals, also because I feel the pain points you describe in at link . I have too thought about experimenting with TeX rewrites/alternatives and particularly in Rust. I don't know if you are aware, but finl has been also submitted to Lobsters ( link ). One of the comments mentions SILE ( link ). I looked into it ( ▶ this video was nice introduction, although I don't know how up to date it is). It seems to me that SILE replaces many pain points in TeX, while being somewhat close to LuaTeX (and TeX in general), due to use of similiar components (Lua, alogorithms, hyphenation patters, libraries). It even supports "LaTeX" like input syntax, but frankly I don't think that is the part of LaTeX I would keep :). Can you share your opinion on SILE?

Yes, it made me recall this, though I first saw it in FOSDEM '15 talks [1]. I thought it'd be nice to see what people think about this as I'm in the looks for a TeX alternative. [1] ▶ this video

Of recent attempts at dethroning LaTeX, there's also SILE, which actually reuses some LaTeX internals. For some examples of the output (hard to find, the author seems not great at marketing), see e.g.: link link link link link link For a deeper dive, see the author's presentation at FOSDEM 2015 - I found it really amusing - from the starting line of: "I wrote a typesetting system - by mistake." ▶ this video