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Comment by acbart | Hacker News Reader

Having had to write in Scribble, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, and a other similar environments, I'm very surprised everyone is that excited about Scribble. It's not bad, but it was never a game changer for me. Is it just because of the ability to use LISP macros? Is that really that big a deal for you? Personally, I really like Jinja2 for my dynamic sites, MarkDown for writing static documents quickly, and LaTeX for anything where a professional document should be created. What do you think is the major advantage of Scribble?

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It's similar to the appeal of LaTeX: you can write macros (ordinary Racket functions) to do common things. I could build on Scribble to make an online textbook, for example, with cross-referenced theorems and definitions, by defining some extra Scribble functions.

Except, unlike LaTeX, you have a sane programming language instead of hairy macros.

Pollen takes Scribble and strips out much of the structure, leaving a very interesting core: http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

The abstraction behind Scribble is to treat documentation as a compilation phase analogous to Racket's macro-expansion phases. Matthew Flatt talks about it in this video: https://vimeo.com/6630691

He wrote Scribble to scratch his own itch...or rather remove his own pain from having to maintain LaTeX based documentation for Racket/MzScheme. To me, the proof is in the pudding: Racket's documentation is exceptionally good pretty much from top to bottom despite the breadth of projects that fall within the standard download.

The possibility to have a fully-fledged programming language under the hood gives Scribble definitely an edge. Btw, the same is basically true for Luatex. But I think the expressiveness of Scheme might be more suitable for documentation purposes than that of Lua.

For professional looking docs, you can still write them in Markdown, and then have Pandoc process them into LaTeX. Pandoc even lets you put raw LaTeX commands into your Markdown.

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