Pollen: the book is a program

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

Matthew Butterick uses it to publish all his current books (as far as I know), check out some of them at:

* https://beautifulracket.com/ (and this about making it https://beautifulracket.com/appendix/racketcon.html)

* https://practicaltypography.com/

Hmm, is there a cheatsheet or crash course for it? Not particularly interested in reading a book just to get my editing game on. Just throw me in the deep water with the basics, and then I'll jump around to what I need.

Would consider using this instead of LaTeX for my thesis, but not so much if the time investment is too much.

Discussion from 3 years ago (at time of release?) (53 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057

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 surprising shift. "Separation of concerns" is still a thing everybody wants to do, it's just flipping the idea of what should be the same "concern", where React considers every piece of a component to be one concern...and, it seems to work. I'm not sure I'm on board with this for writing, but the results certainly do look very nice; the books the author has published with Pollen all look gorgeoues and are very navigable.

I've been tinkering with Hugo for converting my projects docs to something that isn't in a wiki or a CMS (because I find I dread working with either a wiki or a CMS for large documents). I think it's probably "enough" for all of my needs, so I doubt I'll take the time to learn a bigger system like Pollen...but, it's hard to argue with the quality of the results.