SILE is a typesetting system; its job is to produce beautiful printed documents. Conceptually, SILE is similar to TeX—from which it borrows some concepts and even syntax and algorithms—but the similarities end there. Rather than being a derivative of the TeX family SILE is a new typesetting and layout engine written from the ground up using modern technologies and borrowing some ideas from graphical systems such as InDesign.

First, have a look at the show-off file. SILE allows you to:

• Produce complex document layouts using frames.

• Easily extend the typesetting system in a high-level programming language. (Lua)

• Directly process XML to PDF without the use of XSL stylesheets.

• Typeset text on a grid.

A formula is available for homebrew that can install both stable and head versions. Just run brew install sile for the latest stable release or brew install sile --HEAD to build from the latest git commit.

• Arch Linux packages are available in the AUR that can be installed using your prefered package manager (e.g. yaourt -S sile). Use silefor the latest stable release or sile-git to build from the latest git commit.

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).

• lpeg
• luaexpat
• lgi (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.

If all goes well you should be able to compile one of the sample documents like this:

$ sile examples/test.sil
This is SILE 0.9.2
<examples/test.sil><examples/macros.sil>[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]

You should now have examples/test.pdf ready for review.

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.