SILE is a typesetting system. Its job is to produce beautiful printed documents. It’s similar to TeX, but with some ideas borrowed from InDesign, and written with modern technologies in mind.
First, have a look at the show-off file
SILE allows you to
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Produce complex document layouts using frames.
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Easily extend the typesetting system in a high-level programming language. (Lua)
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Directly process XML to PDF without the use of XSL stylesheets.
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Typeset text on a grid.
Copy-paste each command one by one into the Terminal:
cd
sudo rm -rf sile
sudo apt-get purge sile
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get purge lua5.2
sudo apt-get install build-essential fontconfig libfreetype6 pango-graphite
sudo apt-get install gcc g++ libfreetype6-dev libglib2.0-dev libcairo2-dev
sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool pkg-config ragel gtk-doc-tools
sudo apt-get install checkinstall liblualib50-dev liblua5.1-0-dev
sudo apt-get install gobject-introspection
sudo apt-get install libgirepository1.0-dev
sudo apt-get install lua5.1 luarocks unp libharfbuzz-bin gir1.2-harfbuzz-0.0
sudo apt-get install lua-lgi lua-lpeg libtext-bidi-perl libtext-lorem-perl
sudo luarocks install stdlib
sudo luarocks install lpeg
sudo luarocks install luaexpat
sudo luarocks install lgi
sudo luarocks install inspect
sudo luarocks install luaepnf
sudo luarocks install luarepl
sudo luarocks install cassowary
git clone https://github.com/behdad/harfbuzz
cd harfbuzz/
sudo ./autogen.sh
sudo make
sudo checkinstall
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type 3 and hit to modify version number
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enter 0.9 as version number and hit
apt-cache show harfbuzz
- output of apt-cache show harfbuzz should be something like this:
*Package: harfbuzz
*Status: install ok installed
*Priority: extra
*Section: checkinstall
*Installed-Size: 936
*Maintainer: root@root
*Architecture: amd64
*Version: 0.9-1
*Provides: harfbuzz
*Description: Package created with checkinstall 1.6.2
*Description-md5: 556b8d22567101c7733f37ce6557412e
cd
git clone https://github.com/simoncozens/sile.git
cd sile
sudo sh bootstrap.sh
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo checkinstall
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type 3 and hit to modify version number
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enter 0.91 as version number and hit
apt-cache show sile
- output of apt-cache show sile should be something like this:
*Package: sile
*Status: install ok installed
*Priority: extra
*Section: checkinstall
*Installed-Size: 9220
*Maintainer: root@root
*Architecture: amd64
*Version: 0.91-1
*Provides: sile
*Description: Package created with checkinstall 1.6.2
*Description-md5: 556b8d22567101c7733f37ce6557412e
sile examples/rotate.sil
SILE can be downloaded from its home page, or directly from the release page.
SILE is written in the Lua programming language, so you will need a Lua version 5.1 installation. It also relies on external libraries to access fonts and write PDF files. Its preferred combination of libraries is harfbuzz and a PDF creation library extracted from TeX. It should be possible to harfbuzz from your operating system's package manager. (For Harfbuzz to work you will also need freetype2 and fontconfig installed.) If this is not possible, SILE will attempt to use the GNOME Pango/Cairo libraries.
You also need to install the following Lua libraries using luarocks (downloading luarocks if you do not already have it installed).
lpegluaexpatlgi(required for Pango-Cairo only)
Once your dependencies are installed, run
- ./configure ; make install
(If you are running SILE from git, first run bootstrap.sh and then
configure and make. I don't guarantee that SILE will work from the
repository, although it probably ought to.)
This will place the SILE libraries and executable in a sensible location.
Now try sile examples/test.sil.
Please read the full SILE manual for more information about what SILE is and how it can help you. There are example documents (source and PDF) in the examples/ directory. There's also an FAQ available.
Please report bugs and send patches and pull requests at the github repository. For questions, please contact the author, Simon Cozens simon@simon-cozens.org.
SILE is distributed under the MIT licence.