Merge 6465aca into 71e91a3

documentation/c01-whatis.sil

@@ -64,18 +64,18 @@ way for those instructions to be turned into print.
 
 “Ah,” some people will say, “that sounds very much like TeX!”\footnote{Except
 that, being TeX users, they will say “Ah, that sounds very much like
-T\glue[width=-.1667em]\lower[height=0.5ex]{E}\glue[width=-.125em]X!”} If you
-don’t know much about TeX or don’t care, you can probably skip this section.
+T\glue[width=-.1667em]\lower[height=0.5ex]{E}\glue[width=-.125em]X!”}
 
-And it’s true. SILE owes an awful lot of its heritage to TeX. It would be
-terribly immodest to claim that a little project like SILE was a worthy
-successor to the ancient and venerable creation of the Professor of the Art of
-Computer Programming, but… really, SILE is basically a modern rewrite of TeX.
+And it’s true. SILE owes an awful lot of its heritage to TeX.
+It would be terribly immodest to claim that a little project like SILE
+was a worthy successor to the ancient and venerable creation of the
+Professor of the Art of Computer Programming,
+but… really, SILE is basically a modern rewrite of TeX.
 
 TeX was one of the earliest typesetting systems, and had to make a lot of
 design decisions somewhat in a vacuum. Some of those design decisions have
 stood the test of time—TeX is still an extremely well-used typesetting system
-more than thirty years after its inception, which is a testament to its design
+more than forty years after its inception, which is a testament to its design
 and performance—but many others have not. In fact, most of the development of
 TeX since Knuth’s era has involved removing his early decisions and replacing
 them with technologies which have become the industry standard: we use
@@ -99,18 +99,21 @@ typesetting on a grid. This a must-have feature for anyone
 typesetting bibles and other documents to be printed on thin paper.
 Typesetting on a grid means that each line of text will
 line up between the front and back of each piece of paper producing much less
-visual bleed-through when printed on thin paper. This is virtually impossible
-to accomplish in TeX. There are various hacks to try to make it happen, but
-they’re all horrible. In SILE, you can alter the behaviour of the typesetter
-and include a very short add-on package to enable grid typesetting.
+visual bleed-through when printed on thin paper. This a fairly difficult task
+to accomplish in TeX. There are various solutions trying to address it, but
+they are complex and have limitations.
+In SILE, you can alter the behaviour of the typesetter and include a
+reasonably short add-on package to enable grid typesetting.
 
-In fact, nobody uses plain TeX—they all use LaTeX equivalents plus a huge
+In fact, almost nobody uses plain TeX—they all use LaTeX equivalents plus a huge
 repository of packages available from the The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
-(CTAN) archive. SILE does not benefit from the
-large ecosystem and community that has grown up around TeX; in that sense, TeX
-will remain ahead of SILE for some time to come. But in terms of
-\em{core capabilities}, SILE is already equivalent to TeX—if not
-somewhat more advanced.
+(CTAN) archive.
+SILE does not benefit from the large ecosystem and community that has grown up
+around TeX.\footnote{Nevertheless, SILE does have a small ecosystem of third-party
+packages—More on the topic later.}
+In that sense, TeX will remain ahead of SILE for some time to
+come. But in terms of \em{core capabilities}, SILE aims at being at least
+equivalent to TeX.
 
 \section{SILE versus InDesign}
 
@@ -140,8 +143,8 @@ features.
 In InDesign, text is flowed into \em{frames} on the page. On the left, you can
 see an example of what a fairly typical InDesign layout might look like.
 SILE also uses the concept of frames to determine where text should appear on
-the page, and so it’s possible to use SILE to generate page layouts which are
-more flexible and more complex than that afforded by TeX.
+the page, and so it’s possible to use SILE to generate advanced and flexible
+page layouts.
 
 \smallskip
 
@@ -164,7 +167,8 @@ SILE.
 \section{Conclusion}
 
 SILE\footnote{In case you’re wondering, the author pronounces it
-\font[family=Gentium Plus]{/saɪəl/}, to rhyme with “trial”.} {}takes some textual
+\font[family=Gentium Plus]{/saɪəl/}, to rhyme with “trial”.}
+takes some textual
 instructions and turns them into PDF output. It has
 features inspired by TeX and InDesign, but seeks to be more flexible,
 extensible and programmable than either of them. It’s useful both for