Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by zweep on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:05PM
(#22393937)
What does context-free syntax mean? And what does “you cannot parse it” mean? Meaning you can’t stream it, you need the whole file first?
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Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by CJefferson on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:36PM
(#22394086)
Tex is like a programming language, you have to "run" the program to generate output, and that execution is tightly tied to producing output on paper pages. This means it is extremely difficult to produce good looking HTML, or accessible output.
Re:The SILE Typesetter: Simon's Improved Layout Engine
by The_Amp_Walrus on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:48PM
(#22394126)
Context free means that the language/program can be described using a "context free grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar.
Context free grammars are more expressive than regular expressions, but less expressive than full-blown programming languages.
If you've got a spare 100 or so hours and you're interested in learning more, there's a good lecture series on YouTube about this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeo...