I have been looking for alternatives to the TeX typesetting system for a long time. I tried various flavors of Troff, but quickly became disappointed. I did not know about any modern alternatives. Today I found a few of them.

The two most interesting of them are speedata Publisher and SILE typesetter.

The first one is a modern typesetting software which gets XML-markup as input and generates a PDF document. Examples of generated pages are amazing! Speedata Publisher is an open source project hosted on GitHub.

The second one is a TeX-like typesetter with a LaTeX-inspired input language. It got the best parts of TeX without all the well-known legacy stuff. Looks like SILE is not so robust as speedata Publisher, but it is small and has a permissive license (MIT).

Both of these typesetting engines are written in Lua.

Speedata Publisher:
https://www.speedata.de/en/

SILE:
https://sile-typesetter.org/

#typesetting #lua #tex #latex #troff #sile #speedata

Pollen is a WEB publishing system written in Racket. It allows building of beautiful modern e-books like Butterick's Practical Typography and Beautiful Racket.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

#typesetting #publishing #typography