[HN Gopher] Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Typesetting Engines: A Programmer's Perspective
        
       Author : P_qRs
       Score  : 77 points
       Date   : 2024-11-10 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.ppresume.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.ppresume.com)
        
       | fithisux wrote:
       | sile is missing
        
         | AlbertoGP wrote:
         | It is mentioned in passing though, with a link to its website:
         | 
         | > _It is widely adopted by various typesetting engines like
         | TeX, SILE[1] and Typst, etc._
         | 
         | > _[1]https://sile-typesetter.org/_
        
           | fithisux wrote:
           | I stay corrected then.
        
       | rikroots wrote:
       | The most painful issues I encountered when building out a text
       | layout engine for my JS 2D canvas library were:
       | 
       | - Vertical text - in particular when it comes to how CJK
       | punctuation differs in horizontal and vertical environments (not
       | yet solved)
       | 
       | - Staying on CJK, making sure the punctuation marks that follow a
       | character don't break and remain with their preceding characters
       | at all times. (I expect the same holds for opening quotes etc but
       | haven't experimented).
       | 
       | - Highly ligatured fonts - Devangari, Arabic, etc - there's no
       | solution to styling individual characters within a word that I
       | could find.
       | 
       | - Talking of styling ... underlining text is a nightmare -
       | especially if you want to get the little gap between hanging
       | characters and the underline that HTML/CSS browsers do out of the
       | box
       | 
       | - Formatting Thai fonts ... is another World of Hurt[1]
       | 
       | [1] - https://w3c.github.io/sealreq/thai/
        
         | invalidname wrote:
         | No bidi or Arabic script complexities? Calculating the line
         | break in an RTL situation is just terrible...
        
       | lejalv wrote:
       | GNU TeXmacs (https://youtu.be/H46ON2FB30U) is missing.
        
       | phonon wrote:
       | This overlooks CSS Paged Media based options like paged.js,
       | weasyprint, etc. (You can find the full list here..some open
       | source, some commercial)[0]
       | 
       | [0]https://www.print-css.rocks/tools
        
       | dpflug wrote:
       | Another: https://www.sisudoc.org/
        
       | thangalin wrote:
       | ConTeXt[1] is monolithic typesetting software that I've
       | integrated into my Markdown editor[2]. I find ConTeXt allows for
       | a complete separation of content and presentation. This makes it
       | possible to write a novel in Markdown and produce various styles:
       | a formatted PDF and a manuscript PDF. See the themes output in
       | the screenshots[3]. Too bad the authors didn't evaluate LuaTeX or
       | ConTeXt.
       | 
       | [1]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Installation
       | 
       | [2]: https://keenwrite.com/
       | 
       | [3]: https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
        
       | __mharrison__ wrote:
       | I've written and published over a dozen books. (Two published
       | with big tech publishers, the rest self-published.)
       | 
       | With my most recent book, I've moved my PDF generation to Typst.
       | LaTeX, you served me well, but I'm more than happy to never use
       | you again. Typst is better (or decent enough) in every dimension.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-11-10 23:00 UTC)