sile-typesetter/sile

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1783 stars · 106 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

SILE is a typesetting system that produces beautiful printed documents as PDF output, conceptually similar to TeX but written from scratch in Lua with modern technologies. It supports complex frame-based layouts, XML input, grid typesetting, and extensibility via Lua packages.

Use cases

• typeset a book or journal to PDF
• convert XML documents to PDF without XSL stylesheets
• produce complex page layouts with frames
• typeset text on a grid
• extend a typesetting engine with Lua scripts
• find a modern alternative to TeX/LaTeX
• automate PDF generation in a CI pipeline

When to choose

• you need programmatic, extensible typesetting with Lua instead of TeX macros
• you want to render XML directly to PDF
• you need frame-based complex layouts or grid typesetting
• you want to run typesetting as a CI job or in Docker

When to avoid

• you need the vast package ecosystem and community of LaTeX
• you want a WYSIWYG word processor or desktop publishing GUI
• you only need simple Markdown-to-PDF conversion
• your team already has deep TeX expertise and tooling

Facets

application · maturity active

pdf templating documentation parser documentation pdf text-editors windows bsd cli typesetting tex-alternative lua pdf-generation layout-engine book-publishing xml-to-pdf publishing linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="sile-typesetter/sile")