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Comment by sanskritabelt | Hacker News Reader

I looked at the sample output (http://www.mos6581.org/files/intro_template.pdf) and is it just me or does the vertical spacing seem off? (for example, look at the tables and how the text goes right up to kiss the horizontal bars).

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To me the sample output doesn't produce any aesthetic pleasure at the moment, I can't imagine using it even for the simplest material, provided I can choose between LaTeX and it. I hope it will improve.

The title is definitely misleading: "modern LaTeX" it still isn't.

For me, using PDF.js in Firefox for Android, it looks even worse; most of the text is garbled junk characters (only code blocks appear correctly). It's substituting characters and using a different font which PDF.js could not load. (Another renderer is displaying it correctly.) Using character substitution as a standard technique is a really bad idea, and is the only thing that is preventing me from taking a deeper look at it with a view to using it as a backend for a play script/musical/opera libretti format that I wrote; it makes the document inaccessible to things like screen readers and prevents ready copying of text and search. Is there a good reason why substitution is used? If you're willing/compliant to the notion of removing it, I'd probably be pleased to help out with the project.

(This script format tool I wrote is also written in Python, and at present I'm writing to HTML and using wkhtmltopdf to produce a PDF, but that tool is making a mess of the text kerning so that the final result isn't as much of a pleasure to read from as it should be; your tool, however, is producing what are in my eyes quite nice-looking documents---I can easily overlook minor spacing issues at this comparatively early stage.)

Wow, that really is hideous, e.g. the table at the beginning of section III. I wish this guy the best, but TeX was written by a very smart and utterly obsessive man, and typography is an ancient and complex field. I doubt this will work out.

Unless the guy gets help from a typographer. Knuth sought assistance from Hermann Zapf. That proved a fantastic duo.

Note that this is a WIP version; you should not judge RinohType on the basis of the example documents for now. I hope you'll understand that at this point I'm focusing on functionality, not on style.

The table rendering got messed up when I rewrote the line spacing code. Fixing the table rendering would just require an adjustment of the table style definition.

"you should not judge RinohType on the basis of the example documents for now. I hope you'll understand that at this point I'm focusing on functionality, not on style."

Then please be more honest. It's not "A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python" -- it's 6500 lines of Python implementing a typesetting language with vastly inferior to TeX, or even Microsoft Word. It may have a syntax more comfortable to Python or Ruby programmers. Just say what you've done.

Yeah, I think I’ll stick with the “dated look” of LaTeX documents for now.

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