[HN Gopher] Polytype: A Rosetta Stone for typesetting engines
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Polytype: A Rosetta Stone for typesetting engines
Author : ubavic
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-06-22 10:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (polytype.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (polytype.dev)
| jhbadger wrote:
| Interesting idea, although I'm not sure of the choice of engines.
| I recognize LaTeX and groff, but none of the others. And
| conversely, engines that I would expect to be there like plain
| TeX, Lout, and even just Markdown (which combined with pandoc can
| be used to typeset documents). aren't there.
| necovek wrote:
| Or HTML + CSS for that matter (with media tags for page-
| specific formatting, but most of the formatting is not page-
| specific -- only page breaks really are, though they are a
| large area of focus for widow lines, paragraph breaks etc)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| There's a meaningful distinction between the typesetting
| engine and the markup or interface you use to typeset
| documents. This project seems only concerned with the
| underlying engines. But for example go look at a raw groff
| file, it's obviously not intended to be written by hand and
| no one does. Latex on the other hand is a complete system,
| with a language to set documents and an engine to render
| them.
|
| Html + css or markdown for that matter are only the interface
| layer, to compare them this way you'd need to specify an
| implementation. Minute typographic details are still one of
| the places where browsers diverge from each other in their
| behavior.
| necovek wrote:
| CSS is both a language _and_ specification defining the
| typesetting (box) model. While there are certainly
| incompatibilities between different implementations, where
| CSS + HTML are well-defined, those would be bugs. That 's
| why it's today actually possible to write one set of HTML
| and CSS and have it render identically in different
| browsers.
|
| One could say the same for different TeX "formats" like
| LaTeX or Plain TeX which can be all be rendered with
| multiple mostly-compatible TeX engines. If you are familiar
| with TeX internals, it's outputting layouts of boxes for
| letters (TFM metrics files for fonts) inside pages (DVI
| files) that get filled later with bitmapped glyphs from
| bitmap font files (PK fonts). This is entirely different
| for PDF/PS-based TeX engines which use vector sizing and
| which are not identical to original TeX.
|
| There are certainly more nuances (eg. hinting for vector
| fonts that aligns curves to pixel/dot grid), but languages
| and layout engines are usually tightly coupled.
| bux93 wrote:
| paged.js and weasyprint ingest HTML, as shown in the
| helloworld example.
| necovek wrote:
| Thanks for highlighting that.
|
| My point was that you don't need anything extra: HTML + CSS
| define a lot of the laying-out definitions, they are
| ubiquitouos, and rendering for the screen requires
| "typesetting" just as much as it does for paper.
| jmml97 wrote:
| Markdown is not a typesetting engine. It is a markup language.
| What pandoc does is convert the markdown syntax into LaTeX
| syntax and then run a TeX engine to produce the desired PDF.
|
| Typst is a new entry in the document typesetting field.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Markdown is not a typesetting engine. It is a markup
| language. What pandoc does is convert the markdown syntax
| into LaTeX syntax and then run a TeX engine to produce the
| desired PDF.
|
| If we're going to go that route, neither is LaTeX a
| typesetting engine; it is a macro package built on the
| typesetting engine of TeX.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >although I'm not sure of the choice of engines
|
| If have not searched for (LaTeX-)alternative typesetting
| engines/systems (nor are an avid HN visitor; all those had at
| least one popular submission here), unsurprising to not have
| heard of them. Lout strangely omitted though, yes.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Chrestomathy:
|
| 1 : a selection of passages used to help learn a language
|
| 2 : a volume of selected passages or stories of an author
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Cool idea. Suggestion: side-by-side output.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Is this "typesetting" only referring to things like page layout?
| For glyph rendering and shaping, I thought FreeType and HarfBuzz
| were the most popular open source engines, which I don't see
| here.
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