Pollen: the book is a program

#1

Post by Tomte » Fri, May 30, 2014, 2:47 PM UTC

Pollen: the book is a program
mbutterick.github.io

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#2

Post by Vaskivo » Fri, May 30, 2014, 3:32 PM UTC

Awesome!

I love Butterick’s Practical Typography. It taught me a lot about typography, and started my love for typefaces.

The fact that Matthew Butterick is, a lawyer, a typographer and a programmer just increase my respect for him.

Thank you for your work!

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#3

Post by capnrefsmmat » Fri, May 30, 2014, 4:07 PM UTC

I've been looking at this recently. It looks like an extension of what made TeX so successful: your typesetter is programmable -- and macros can live in your documents, defined at any time -- so any common tedious task can be automated.

Sure, Markdown and the rest have a simple syntax for everything, but what if you're writing a book and want cross-references? Or you commonly use side-by-side examples (good grammar vs. bad grammar, say) and want a macro that generates the appropriate table layout. Or you want some macros which typeset entries in your CV. And instead of crufty TeX macros you can use Racket.

If I weren't already writing a book in LaTeX I'd try writing one in Pollen.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#4

Post by Tomte » Fri, May 30, 2014, 4:11 PM UTC

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #3

I've been looking at this recently. It looks like an extension of what made TeX so successful: your typesetter is programmable -- and macros can live in your documents, defined at any time -- so any common tedious task can be automated. Sure, Markdown and the rest have a simple syntax for everything, but what if you're writing a book and want cross-references? Or you commonly use side-by-side examples (good grammar v…

And the macro language is actually sane!

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#5

Post by arnarbi » Fri, May 30, 2014, 5:23 PM UTC

This looks great! I like the documentation itself even more, is that generated with pollen as well?

Edit: I answered my own question, the documentation is generated using Scribble: http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#6

Post by jestinjoy1 » Fri, May 30, 2014, 5:32 PM UTC

Can I export it to PDF like in TeX?

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#7

Post by cube_yellow » Fri, May 30, 2014, 5:43 PM UTC

How many times are we going to poorly reinvent features of org-mode?

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#8

Post by thrush » Fri, May 30, 2014, 5:48 PM UTC

[How] Can we add keyboard navigation?

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#9

Post by ivansavz » Fri, May 30, 2014, 5:50 PM UTC

This looks very interesting. Books really are code: I now have 10+ conditional flags in my book: ifPG13, ifPRINT, ifEBOOK, ifEREADER, etc. I'm looking to add more, but the basic \ifthenelse macro in LaTeX won't be enough...

How hard would it be to implement things like \ref and \pageref and support more of the LaTeX environments supported by MathJax?

I think a triple output format HTML + ePub + LaTeX|PDF|print would be awesome --- I'd switch right away!

Thanks for releasing this as LGPL.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#10

Post by mjf2 » Fri, May 30, 2014, 5:54 PM UTC

Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?