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Pollen: the book is a program

docs.racket-lang.org

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Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#71

Post by [deleted] »

paulriddle wrote: post #34
wodenokoto wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also advocate not using underline to denote links. In his practical typography book he practically hides all hyperlinks. I also find his redesigns of documentation pages uninviting to read. I find Butterick to be a passionate, opinionated, hard working, but ultimately a poor designer.

I agree. His book Practical Typography is very hard on the eyes, even looking at the text is uncomfortable. I think he fell into a trap of overdoing things. Like some people when they learn about what you can do with javascript and css add all sorts of annoying visual effects with no unified theme to the whole. They just enter some sort of trance and keep adding.

[deleted]

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#72

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

Semiapies wrote: post #22
zeamaize wrote: post #17

> I chose the lozenge as the command character because a) it appears in almost every font, b) it’s barely used in ordinary typesetting, c) it’s not used in any programming language that I know of, and d) its shape and color allow it to stand out easily in code without being distracting. > If you’re using DrRacket, you can use the Insert Command Char button at the top of the editing window to — you guessed it — insert…

It's perfectly fine if and only if you're on a Mac . It gets bad on every other platform.

On Linux you can configure the combinations that the compose key accepts.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#73

Post by criddell »

hellbanner wrote: post #2

This looks very cool. Have you (jdoliner or anyone else) used this to publish a book?

I understand his argument against ebooks[1], but I still wish I could buy a copy in that format. On a Kindle you do give up something with respect to typography and you have to accept non-standard formats, but you gain something in readability.

I respect his choices though and I hope future devices eliminate his typography and format concerns.

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/why-theres-no-e-book-or-pdf....

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#74

Post by otakucode »

SwellJoe wrote: post #10

It's interesting to see a somewhat widespread shift away from the separation of code, templates, styles, and text model of publishing things (mostly websites, but most publishing can be boiled down to that if you squint), where code/templates/style get merged into one. React does this. Pollen seemingly takes it even further and sticks the text in the code, too. Or, rather sticks the code in the text, I guess. It's a…

I don't find it that surprising. It's the Literate Programming Knuth came up with ages ago. I own a book called 'Physically Based Rendering' which deals with rendering images through, essentially, simulation of the physics of light which is written in the same manner. As far as I know, Knuths work and the Physically Based Rendering book are the only ones published which are of that type... well until I saw this posting this morning, that is!

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#75

Post by tonyg »

kuschku wrote: post #52
Xophmeister wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Racket by default also doesn’t use the keyword "lambda", but instead uses "λ". I'm not sure that's true: Welcome to Racket v6.10.1. > (define foo (lambda (x) (+ x 1))) > (foo 1) 2

As I mentioned, both are possible, but (λ ...) is strictly preferred.

This is certainly not the case. Some, but by no means all, of the core maintainers prefer the unicode glyph, but the vast majority of the code uses a spelled-out lambda.

In my current checkout of the codebase, I see the following:

    ~/src/racket/racket/share/pkgs$ ag lambda **/*.rkt | wc -l
    1041

    ~/src/racket/racket/share/pkgs$ ag λ **/*.rkt | wc -l
    163
Note also consistent usage of spelled-out lambda in the Racket style guide, https://docs.racket-lang.org/style/.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#76

Post by TuringTest »

Chiba-City wrote: post #53

This looks lovely and near perfect. But what happened to Docbook? I worry about tool longevity and thus ongoing editability of source assets. I imagine groff still might grind old tbl and nroff and docs into Postscript.

> But what happened to Docbook?

What, isn't everybody using DITA nowadays? /s

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#77

Post by jimhefferon »

Chiba-City wrote: post #53

This looks lovely and near perfect. But what happened to Docbook? I worry about tool longevity and thus ongoing editability of source assets. I imagine groff still might grind old tbl and nroff and docs into Postscript.

Like many computer things, Docbook had (and as I understand it still has) a life in a certain domain. But, for reasons that are perhaps not perfectly clear, it never made the jump to hyperspeed. It just never became the thing.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#79

Post by inetsee »

stefanwlb wrote: post #55

The web browser display is very beautiful. But how would I go about seeing it offline? Is there a PDF sample of Pollen I can try on my eBook reader?

One thing that disappoints me about Pollen is that I haven't seen any easy way to produce output in the Epub format.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#80

Post by sigzero »

IshKebab wrote: post #48
Ygg2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is until you find an obscure enough example that uses it.

I've never seen a vaguely popular programming language use ¬ and that is available on all keyboards (for some weird reason).

I have only seen Applescript use it.
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