41–50 of 56 posts
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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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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.
I know that it's straightforward, I'd like to hear about pros and cons I haven't found myself.
Hi, 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…
That said, TeX got a lot of things right."
So why not resist the start-from-scratch instinct and build a framework on top of TeX instead? In that way, you would not only inherit all that TeX gets right already; but most importantly, you gain an existing huge userbase practically by proxy by making it easy for many TeX-using authors to use your framework without having to change their existing workflows or rework their source files (including, as it happens, many in this very thread, as you can see).
I understand starting a new publishing framework from scratch is much more appealing than the daunting prospect of building a higher-level lispy macro language on top of TeX that achieves your goals of readability, power and ease of use; but there are reasons why sometimes improving existing frameworks is often preferable than tossing everything away and starting over from scratch[1].
Hi, 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…
"(...) my thinly-veiled ambition is to create a contemporary successor to TeX. Contemporary = optimized for web publishing + better "macro" language (Racket) + shallower learning curve. That said, TeX got a lot of things right." So why not resist the start-from-scratch instinct and build a framework on top of TeX instead? In that way, you would not only inherit all that TeX gets right already; but most importantly, y…
Bear in mind that creating Pollen was a side mission of the main project: making the website http://practicaltypography.com. The existing tools weren't good enough, so I ended up making my own. I looked at using TeX. No one had anything nice to say about its HTML capabilities. So I moved on.
Pollen does less than TeX. But it also demands less (in terms of setup & learning curve). Authors who need everything TeX can do aren't going to be interested in Pollen. But that's OK — they already have TeX.
How to type a lozenge: Mac: option + shift + V Windows: holding down alt, type 9674 on the num pad Ubuntu: ctrl + shift + U, then 25CA"
That's an unfortunate choice, imo. Pollen looks great but I wouldn't want to have to type that character all the time.
Sorry to nitpick, I think everything else I've seen (so far) is very encouraging. Looks like something halfway between Markdown and LaTeX.
I wonder when Atwood's Law will kick in and we'll see more ambitious JavaScript-based tools like this (maybe with sweet.js macros to provide higher level constructs). JS already turns a document format into a program, but plain HTML+JS is not the best authoring format.
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"(...) my thinly-veiled ambition is to create a contemporary successor to TeX. Contemporary = optimized for web publishing + better "macro" language (Racket) + shallower learning curve. That said, TeX got a lot of things right." So why not resist the start-from-scratch instinct and build a framework on top of TeX instead? In that way, you would not only inherit all that TeX gets right already; but most importantly, y…
I didn't start from scratch. I built the project on top of Racket & Scribble (which itself has similarities to TeX). Bear in mind that creating Pollen was a side mission of the main project: making the website http://practicaltypography.com . The existing tools weren't good enough, so I ended up making my own. I looked at using TeX. No one had anything nice to say about its HTML capabilities. So I moved on. Pollen do…
On the other hand, I can't help but remark on the vague sense of missed opportunity in your project. I know for a fact that "authors who need everything TeX can do" are indeed interested in a streamlined TeX to web-book authoring library[1], precisely because of the lack of good HTML packages that stopped you from developing on it in the first place. An easy-to-use package like beamer but for outputting nice, responsive webbooks or articles on a whim would be a gigantic boon to the sciences.
[1] There are several TeX to HTML tools out there already, but the output quality isn't that great and in any case the well-known ones are not intended specifically for webbook authoring. There's also PubMed Central's PubReader, but for specially-tagged XML articles, not TeX. See: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/43847/why-havent-any-...
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I didn't start from scratch. I built the project on top of Racket & Scribble (which itself has similarities to TeX). Bear in mind that creating Pollen was a side mission of the main project: making the website http://practicaltypography.com . The existing tools weren't good enough, so I ended up making my own. I looked at using TeX. No one had anything nice to say about its HTML capabilities. So I moved on. Pollen do…
True, true. "By scratch" I erroneously meant "on top of TeX", my bad. I take that back. On the other hand, I can't help but remark on the vague sense of missed opportunity in your project. I know for a fact that "authors who need everything TeX can do" are indeed interested in a streamlined TeX to web-book authoring library[1], precisely because of the lack of good HTML packages that stopped you from developing on it…
So a conversion tool would probably be useful (even if it would probably choke on pgf/tikz diagrams --- presumably there are already ways to convert those to svg separately, though). But the macro language is terrible. Most of what TeX gets right are things like page layout, hyphenation, page breaks, etc., none of which are affected by changing or keeping the macro language (and all of which need to be changed for the web anyway).
Besides, there are already acceptable ways of putting a LaTeX document on the web --- save it as a pdf and upload it. It's not the best way to put something online, but it's not much worse than a single long web page. Obviously, something like http://practicaltypography.com is much better as a website than as a collection of pdf files, but getting there from a single large LaTeX paper or book is going to take some amount of reorganization anyway. Converting the macros should be relatively easy. (especially with mathjax support)