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Pollen: the book is a program

mbutterick.github.io

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Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#31

Post by Tomte »

mbutterick wrote: post #30
mjf2 wrote: post #10

Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?

You can use MathJax inside Pollen today. As far as building more integrated support for math typesetting, I'd like to do that, but what I'm not sure about yet are the ergonomics. Ideally, you'd just be able to drop TeX-style math expressions into the markup, indicating whether they're inline or block, and Pollen would do the right thing in terms of handling the rendering (based on whether the output is a web page vs.…

How do you think about MathJax vs. pre-rendering formulae to images and using those, with the TeX input as the alt attribute? Oh, and using STIX or whatever as web font.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#32

Post by ska »

mjf2 wrote: post #29
ska wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mathematica has a pretty decent typesetting system, but it's not open source or free...

True. When last I looked it wasn't quite competitive with TeX but still pretty good compared to, say Word. But it is also a niche system.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#34

Post by ska »

mbutterick wrote: post #30
mjf2 wrote: post #10

Does it have mathematical typesetting like Tex?

You can use MathJax inside Pollen today. As far as building more integrated support for math typesetting, I'd like to do that, but what I'm not sure about yet are the ergonomics. Ideally, you'd just be able to drop TeX-style math expressions into the markup, indicating whether they're inline or block, and Pollen would do the right thing in terms of handling the rendering (based on whether the output is a web page vs.…

knitr does this reasonably well for letting you drop LaTeX directly into R reports with a delimiter... if you haven't seen that might be worth a look at the interface in some examples (e.g. http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/showcase/)

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#35

Post by breadbox »

ColinDabritz wrote: post #28
Blahah wrote: post #12

Beautiful, 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...

I was considering an esoteric (joke) language that would compile a blank file to print "Hello, world!", q to a quine, g to guess, and similar. I never got around to creating it though.

HQ9+ already fills that niche well enough.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#38

Post by dfc »

I have been looking forward to trying this out ever since I heard about pollen in one of MB's talks on typography. Unfortunately it requires racket 6.0 and Debian only has 5.3.6 in unstable and nothing in experimental.

According to the "package 6.0" bugreport it looks like things are not going to change very soon:

  As far as I understand, the build system and general organization of
  racket has been changed quite a lot for 6.0. I'm not sure how soon I'll
  find time and motivation to work on this, especially since I'm committed
  to using 5.3.6 at $WORK through the end of April.
I cant remember the last time I saw a self extracting shell archive installation and/or a shar without a gpg signature.

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#39

Post by soegaard »

dfc wrote: post #38

I have been looking forward to trying this out ever since I heard about pollen in one of MB's talks on typography. Unfortunately it requires racket 6.0 and Debian only has 5.3.6 in unstable and nothing in experimental. According to the "package 6.0" bugreport it looks like things are not going to change very soon: As far as I understand, the build system and general organization of racket has been changed quite a lot…

You can install Racket 6 directly from the Racket web-page: http://download.racket-lang.org/

You can see the SHA1 hashes of the distribution here: http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/snapshots/

Re: Pollen: the book is a program

#40

Post by soegaard »

Tomte wrote: post #31
mbutterick wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use MathJax inside Pollen today. As far as building more integrated support for math typesetting, I'd like to do that, but what I'm not sure about yet are the ergonomics. Ideally, you'd just be able to drop TeX-style math expressions into the markup, indicating whether they're inline or block, and Pollen would do the right thing in terms of handling the rendering (based on whether the output is a web page vs.…

How do you think about MathJax vs. pre-rendering formulae to images and using those, with the TeX input as the alt attribute? Oh, and using STIX or whatever as web font.

There is already a couple of packages for Racket that prerenders formulas in TeX into various graphic formats (they call LaTeX to the rendering). It is straightforward to use these from Pollen.
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