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Skribilo: A Document Programming Framework

nongnu.org

119 pointsTomte22 comments

Mi preskaŭ ne interesiĝis pri tiu artikolo ĉar mi preferas uzi Markdown aŭ HTML depende de miaj celoj, ĝis mi agnoskis, ke la nomo estas el la internacia lingvo. Bele!

I was almost uninterested in this article because I prefer to use Markdown or HTML depending on my goals, till I realised that the name is from Esperanto. Very nice!

Ha, mi pensis same. Ne sxancas, ke ilo por skribi nomigxas "Skribilo".

Seems very similar to Racket's Scribble: https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html

I quite enjoyed working with Scribble for my ridesharing side project. If you want examples of how it looks, just browse the Racket documentation. Very pretty and (dare I say) easy to work with.

Look at the "History" and "Related Links" to see where the inspiration came from (mostly Skribe, but Scribble is also mentioned).

Scribe was a scheme system for typesetting that was published two or three decades ago. I know Skribilio is related to it, and I would be very surprised if scribble is not in any way related.

Can someone explain what reasons would lead you to choose this over simply writing in HTML or another markup language directly?

It seems more like "TeX-but-btw-it's-Scheme" than HTML. Interesting idea, hard to go wrong with S-expressions.

Adding a compilation step let’s you change the way things look easier in addition to having clearer semantics for the intent

I believe the key difference with using a tool like Skribilo is that you have the full computational power of Scheme and can generate dynamic content. Other tools may be equal to just the writing aspect but this is Scheme turned inside out. Instead of a language creating content; this is content blocks interwoven with language output.

PDF with embedded Javascript -- bad idea!

Text with embedded Scheme -- good idea?

Scheme source code is text with embedded scheme ;).

The issue with JavaScript embeds in PDF’s is that PDF’s are final documents and the default assumption is that they are not executables…a mistaken assumption perhaps but the default nonetheless.

Skribilo is source code for a document…it will tend to generate a final document and tend not to be the distributed artifact.

Had and still have that with OpenJade since 1994 or so, based on ISO 8879:1986 (SGML) and ISO 10179:1996 (DSSSL/Scheme).

Sounds like PHP....

Anyone have a feel for how this might compare to Pollen? https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

It fills the same niche as scribble. So: less lozenge, more unquote.

It is way more complex than Markdown and saying it doesn't require expertise is plain wrong.

"Skribilo's markup language to provide information about the document's structure, which is similar to HTML or LaTeX and does not require expertise."

It is also a lot more powerful than markdown. If you already know a little bit of scheme, Skribilio takes about 5 minutes to learn.

Why would I use this and not Pandoc?

One small past thread:

Skribilo: A Scheme-Based Document Programming Framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8453884 - Oct 2014 (2 comments)

Cool. This might be an inaccurate assessment, but Skribilo reminds me of PanDoc, made with Scheme instead of Haskell, and with a somewhat harder to spell name.

Any comparisons with Scribble?

They are both descendants, spiritual or direct, of Scribe, the scheme document system from the 90s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com