What is Burro?
Burro is a new language for digital typesetting.
Example
This is a simple example; many more commands are available than those shown here.
Input
.margins[3in]
.start
.align[center]
.letter_space[1.5pt]
.pt_size[18]
.vspace[2P]
.smallcaps[Burro]
.vspace[1.5P]
.rule{
.width[90%]
}[0.5pt]
.align[justify]
; Lines beginning with a ; are commented out.
; The "-" argument resets the value of these commands
; to their previous values.
.pt_size[-]
.letter_space[-]
This is a demonstration of .italic[Burro],
a new typesetting language designed
for text-heavy documents.
Output
The below image is a screenshot of the output, zoomed in and centered. You can download the actual output PDF as well.
Get Started
Burro is currently in pre-release development. You can find the source code to download or contribute at its repository.
You can ask any questions about using or contributing to Burro in the Burro chat on Zulip or by emailing the project mailing list.
You can also read about the project status, roudmap, and vision on the project blog.
Philosophy
Burro is a typesetting language that is easy to type. It merges the convenience and light syntax of Markdown with the power of TeX. Burro is directly inspired by, and aims to become a spiritual successor to, groff with the mom macro set.
Burro is modeled after the artistic experience of setting type in a physical printing press. When you are setting type by hand, you go one word at a time until your line is full, and then you add your leading and move to the next line. Burro brings this same approach to digital typesetting—it does not look ahead and try to optimize the layout. Instead, it expects you to tweak the output as needed.
Rather than making design decisions for you, Burro trusts you. You tell Burro what parameters you want it to use, and then it lays out the type exactly according to those parameters. This may seem strange if you're used to a more powerful layout algorithm, but it opens up a surprising amount of typographic freedom!
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Zulip for providing sponsored hosting in Zulip Cloud Standard via their open source sponsorship program.
It's been repeated many times on this website, but Burro would not exist without Peter Schaffter and his excellent work on the mom macro set for groff.