Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by Mathnerd314 on Saturday February 22, 2020 @05:18PM
(#22393706)
The test example looks alright: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/blob/master/examples...
The kerning doesn't look great, but that's the fonts (DejaVu Sans + Libertine AFAICT).
Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by kragen on Saturday February 22, 2020 @05:28PM
(#22393772)
The test example literally has a double hyphen "--" in place of an em dash, which begins a line, provoking an unjustified momentary appearance of being an utterance by a character quoted in the French or Spanish style; and the author's name in body-text type right-aligned at the top of the page looks like a typographical error. Still, it's eminently readable, with reasonable hyphenation. My typographical sins in the PDF rendering of Dercuano were, in many cases, far worse (no hyphenation at all!), but I hacked together Dercuano's PDF renderer in 5 days as a last resort, and I don't claim that the result is "beautiful", although I wish it were.
Thank you helping me be slightly less of an arrogant jerk!
Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by munificent on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:46PM
(#22394121)
The faux em dash definitely caught my eye. The hyphenated "ory" on its own line at the end of a paragraph is another really bad look.
If these are the examples to pitch the system... it doesn't seem ready for primetime. That's OK. Every project has to start somewhere, but the README could stand to frame that a little better.
Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by kragen on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:56PM
(#22394158)
Yeah, I wouldn't want to influence the author to stop working on typesetting, but I found the arrogant boasting really annoying.
I was hoping to be able to soften this criticism by saying "at least it looks better than the output of the last layout engine I wrote", which would not be a hard bar to clear (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano.20191230.pdf is full of egregious typographical sins), but https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile/commit/e72aafd58f855... (Liddell & Scott, I would have thought? Although it has no title page, table of contents, or even headwords, and https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlex00lidduoft/page/x... contains about 20× as much text) seems to be missing most of the definitions and doesn't even look that good. The first entry, αδην, defined by Liddell & Scott as "to one's fill" with 12 lines of elaboration, reads simply, "αδην adv. .". (Except with the proper diacritics, of course.)
That's probably just a bug or something, but I am therefore unfortunately unable to soften my criticism with such a compliment.