Interesting software. Actually, I wish there was a way to use some other character (or string) instead of the lozenge character (◊) for commands. I mean, I see the reason for using a weird symbol, but I'm not even sure how to enter it from the keyboard other than by copy-pasting it. Is it some sort of standard symbol in DrRacket environment? Maybe, a directive for changing this symbol can be added: #commands_start_wi…
Pollen: the book is a program
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#22Hi, this is Matthew Butterick. If you have specific questions about Pollen's capabilities (e.g., "how hard would it be to ...") I encourage you to post them to the GitHub repo at http://github.com/mbutterick/pollen . I'd love to make it more useful for other authors, especially those in technical fields, so I welcome all suggestions. TeX has been mentioned several times — I don't mind that comparison at all, since my…
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#23Hi, this is Matthew Butterick. If you have specific questions about Pollen's capabilities (e.g., "how hard would it be to ...") I encourage you to post them to the GitHub repo at http://github.com/mbutterick/pollen . I'd love to make it more useful for other authors, especially those in technical fields, so I welcome all suggestions. TeX has been mentioned several times — I don't mind that comparison at all, since my…
The bit in the book / manual about typing a "lozenge" character that shows how with an Apple then has two blank lines for windows and linux is a little disconcerting.
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#24Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?
After all, Knuth didn't write TeX because he needed a typography solution, he wrote it because he needed a typography solution for mathematics.
All these years later, and TeX (with or without LaTeX) is far and away the best solution I know of.
As for the mass market: Word's typesetting of mathematics is terrible, as is the interface (for anything but the simplest expressions). MathML is an interesting idea, but has a long way to go on the actual typesetting, as well as being much more painful to use than LaTeX...
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#25Hi, this is Matthew Butterick. If you have specific questions about Pollen's capabilities (e.g., "how hard would it be to ...") I encourage you to post them to the GitHub repo at http://github.com/mbutterick/pollen . I'd love to make it more useful for other authors, especially those in technical fields, so I welcome all suggestions. TeX has been mentioned several times — I don't mind that comparison at all, since my…
I've always thought lisps were a natural fit for this sort of thing; the cl-typesetting project (http://www.fractalconcept.com/asp/cl-typesetting) didn't get a lot of traction but was pretty effective, are/were you aware of that one?
Any intention to tackle higher quality typesetting for hardcopy/pdf ?
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#26Hi, this is Matthew Butterick. If you have specific questions about Pollen's capabilities (e.g., "how hard would it be to ...") I encourage you to post them to the GitHub repo at http://github.com/mbutterick/pollen . I'd love to make it more useful for other authors, especially those in technical fields, so I welcome all suggestions. TeX has been mentioned several times — I don't mind that comparison at all, since my…
The bit in the book / manual about typing a "lozenge" character that shows how with an Apple then has two blank lines for windows and linux is a little disconcerting.
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#27Interesting software. Actually, I wish there was a way to use some other character (or string) instead of the lozenge character (◊) for commands. I mean, I see the reason for using a weird symbol, but I'm not even sure how to enter it from the keyboard other than by copy-pasting it. Is it some sort of standard symbol in DrRacket environment? Maybe, a directive for changing this symbol can be added: #commands_start_wi…
Ref for others, on OSX, its: option + shift + V
See http://mbutterick.github.io/pollen/doc/reader.html
edit: key commands now fixed for other platforms
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#28Beautiful, and I'll use it for my first book. But I have to call out the claim: > I think Pollen just won the Hello World Tournament. That tournament was won permanently by the M4 language in 1977. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hello_world_program_exa...
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#29Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?
This is the real kicker for some applications. After all, Knuth didn't write TeX because he needed a typography solution, he wrote it because he needed a typography solution for mathematics. All these years later, and TeX (with or without LaTeX) is far and away the best solution I know of. As for the mass market: Word's typesetting of mathematics is terrible, as is the interface (for anything but the simplest express…
Re: Pollen: the book is a program
#30Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?