Sile: The LaTeX Alternative

Feb 15, 2022 · 2 min read · Typography

Sile's a typesetting program which makes nifty pdfs. It's been going great for me, so I thought I'd share the journey so far.

The Good

It's based on lua, which is super-simple. You don't need to know any lua to use it, but if you want to poke about, it's easier enough for a non programmer to get an idea of what's going on.
It focusses on fields, so typesetting multiple columns, large headers, et c., is more reliable than Latex (no images wizzing off the page margin yet).
Less breakable.
It creates variables (\newcounter) if you haven't declared them.
Variables are universal, so no worrying about which things tcolorbox recognizes, and what gets passed to tabular. Everyhing gets passed unless you tell it not to.
Packages work together better IME, so far. I've only been playing for a while, but you can string arbitrary packages together and commands work as you expect them to.
It's tiny. ~7 Megs, including all basic packages, rather than 4.5 Gigs for a full Latex install.
Select any font.
UTF-8 supported natively - no problem with Cyrillic, katakana, et c.
Random system fonts are used without problem or added packages (actually the docs notes you might have some problems).
Clear documentation. Less than 100 pages. I have over 30 megabytes of Latex documentation so far.
Development on the git's been pretty steady, so it looks pretty future-proof.

Youth. (Doesn't have many packages)
It's set up to support tikz-like output well, given the XML support, but I suspect that actually doing tikz-things would involve learning a lot of Lua.
No subsubsections in the book class.
Limited documentation. If you don't find what you need in the basic docs, you have to look at source code.
Maths formulae are not the goal, so support will probably continue to be limited.

The Sile Website has great documentation already. I really hope it supersedes LaTeX one day, because LaTeX is deeply flawed.