Welcome to sile Discussions!

[alerque]

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To get started, comment below with an introduction of yourself and tell us about what you do with this community.

[OlivierNicole]

Hello, I'm a computer science engineer with an interest in typography. It started when I used LaTeX for the first time to typeset a high school memoir, and never really stopped since.

I became interested in SILE because it takes as input a sane description language and can be programmed in a sane language — even though I like statically typed languages better, I can see how the run-time nature of everything in Lua helps to flexibly modify part of the typesetter during typesetting itself.

During the various lockdowns I worked on math typesetting in SILE because that's what I can most relate to, and I also hope that it might expand the interest in SILE to new people and maybe eventually draw more contributions to all aspects of SILE.

[Omikhleia]

Greetings, and thanks @alerque for the initiative opening these "Discussions" !

I am a French computer science engineer, born in the early 1970s, with a background in project management and software development (mostly in C++ and, these days, in JavaScript / TypeScript). I always enjoyed coding and hacking (in the noble sense). In the 1980s, my father introduced me to LaTeX, and by the early 1990s I was somehow quite good at it (maybe not a real wizard, but I had some decent knowledge of TeX's internals etc.). But I forgot most of this stuff as time passed... and the TeX world (from a end-user viewpoint) sort of lost me on the way, with all these Dvipxxx variants, then the OmegaTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and Co... Doh! My head hurts.

I have an interest in typography and typesetting (I did typeset a few books of essays with Open/LibreOffice...) and typesetting systems of the kind of SILE: Beyond TeX/LaTeX, I tried Lout many years ago (Lol, this one is nearly forgotten, I guess? Weird beast...), and a bit of XSLT + XSL-FO and FOP (Erm... Oh my! Let's not comment here...) - So when I saw some announcement about SILE a few years ago, I thought I should give it a try... But learning Lua wasn't in my plans, so I postponed... Well, I started playing Minetest at some point (smile), and the scripting there is in Lua, so here I am eventually...

Oh, and I am (or used to be) a huge Tolkien fan, and also a casual writer (as a private hobby)... Just mentioning these things, because most of my current "tests" with SILE use stuff I have in a form or another, so you'll necessarily notice that lineage, if I am to provide examples in issues etc. 😺

As of my involvement in this community - Frankly, I dunno what to say, I just want to try typesetting cool stuff (that is, to my aesthetic taste) with less pain than with the aforementioned tools... And SILE has plenty of appealing qualities. So maybe I am just here to experiment around, and bother you all with patches, suggestions or questions, hehe.

[Omikhleia]

And nearly one year after I started dabbling into SILE, where am I now?

• I am glad to tell that all of my own "main" classes and packages have been upgraded from SILE 0.12 to SILE 0.14 and now provided as installable via luarocks -- Call me an early adopter of the new "3rd party" package manager that was initiated in 0.13, but it rocks, so to speak, and it means anyone can give them a try more easily - It's pretty cool, with 9 "modules" being available.
• I still have 3 experimental packages and 3 specialized components needing the same type of upgrade... These will have to wait (it took 2h to 4h for each single file in the above-mentioned packages, over an intensive period of 3 weeks, so these - who need to be reconsidered anyway - are going to need more thorough evaluation).
• About the "main" packages, it goes beyond mere version upgrading and package bundling. For instance, in my previous book, I was never really happy with the page layout... So my book class now proposes a wide choice of them: the three 'french" layouts ("Canon des ateliers"), each with 3 additional common variants; two historical layouts (Vencentinus, Honnecourt); three "modern" variants of these; and - yes, why not, even Jan Tschichold's golden canon! So that's a choice amongst 18 proposed layouts:
  

Where I am heading now...

• None of these page layouts properly defines where page headers and folios should go. Bringhurst, you won't see me often say this, is not very helpful here... So I am reading other obscure sources and a comparison of books, to check how this could also be proposed with a decent and sound variety of choices... The path to success is uncertain here!
• None of these "usual" book page layouts works well with side nodes (= margin notes; but read further), their margins are too tight. Here again, back on reading and experimenting the maths... I do see some interesting ways to do it while respecting the "canons", so there's a good chance it will see the light.

And of course, related to the last point, I am considering sides notes - well, more precisely, "stacked" side notes, just because they have my visual preference... Quite easy, in theory, but all things take time...

And it is possible that my next book typesetting will require a square page size... An occasion to further the study of page layouts, if time permits it^^

[Omikhleia]

Greetings, fellow SILE users.
I am real glad to announce the second book I composed with SILE, a small collection of essays on Tolkien's Middle-earth.
This time, beside the regular print edition, the PDF is also freely available; and all sources (mostly in Djot, with but a bit of Markdown and SILE-Lua) are provided.

[OlivierNicole]

It looks very nice!

[Omikhleia]

Greetings friends,

Le Dragon de Brume did it again, with On cartography, maps & locations in Middle-earth, another collection of essays on Tolkien's Middle-earth translated from French! As for the previous volume, besides the print-on-demand edition, the PDF and all source files are also freely available under appropriate licenses.

I'm very happy with this new book -- it's my third "real book" composed with SILE, and most of all the second one using my "resilient" framework -- with sources mostly in Djot, with still a bit a SILE-Lua here and there.

My only (small) regret is that I was too short in time to update my whole setup, so the book was generated with the latest resilient modules (updated for that purpose) but however still with a custom build of SILE 0.14 and a few hacks here and there...
There's a proverb in French "Jamais deux sans trois" (which might perhaps translate as "Good things come in threes" ?) -- So I do hope there will be another Tolkien-related volume published by Le Dragon de Brume, and that time, surely, it will use an updated setup... Apart from that, things went smoothly -- "resilient" is getting mature and SILE itself has far less issues than when I started using it seriously, back in Fall 2021.

[Omikhleia]

I had to move on quicker than expected for various reasons... So Le Dragon de Brume just published another book again, available online: A bibliography of Tolkien studies in French & English -- based on the in-development modules for extended bibliographies with CSL support (#2082), still unfinished at this date and thus used here with a few "quick'n dirty" hacks... Yet, I'm very happy with the "initial" result, and -- at least in my opinion -- it shows the path forward, so the next edition may eventually rely on something more robust, typographically nicer, and having passed some kind of "test of fire".
As usual, SILE (even using some still in-development experimental features here) did great! Oh, and I finally used SILE 0.15, so my next steps would now be to finish all those things (that is, the bibliography support for SILE, and also officially migrating all my 3rd-party packages to 0.15; and then add a few extra things to my "resilient" framework...).
As professor Tolkien said, "the road goes even on" -- that is, there's always a new adventure awaiting...