Skribilo: Document Programming Framework | Hacker News Reader

Skribilo: Document Programming Framework

nongnu.org

48 pointsTomte17 comments

Constantly amazed by the number of product names that are just an Esperanto description of it's form/function.

(In this case, skribilo => ilo por skribi, basically translates as "tool for writing").

You'd appreciate this public bike service in Warsaw, Poland then: https://veturilo.waw.pl/en/

on the surface this looks like a peer of https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

many years ago I would have eagerly given this a whirl, but either I'm too old to try new things, or the broader user ecosystem has convinced me that in order to gain significant mindshare, the syntax cannot stray too far from markdown. Scheme in markdown would be an interesting modification though.

Also, while it tickles the heart of a lisper, one uneasiness I have with systems like these is the lack of easy schema definitions, like the url structure in the skribilo examples.

> lack of easy schema definitions, like the url structure in the skribilo examples

This is simple with the help of a define-syntax with a few syntax-rules. Whether it would make the whole document syntax more obscure is another question.

Trivia note: Skribilo was developed by Ludovic Courtès, one of the key figures behind Guix (https://guix.gnu.org/).

I was going to link some related work here, then saw they did a better than usual job of covering that: https://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/index.html#related

Skribilo: A Document Programming Framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27490192 - June 2021 (22 comments)

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

I'm building MonsterWriter and I'm actively looking for an alternative to LaTeX which does not has a copy left license and is not multiple gigabytes in size.

It is so surprising that there is just nothing comparable. I solved the problem by providing a webservice to convert content to LaTeX and then compile it to a PDF.

... eventually I will probably end up building something that works in the browser by using KaTeX + CSS Paged Media + js-citeproc, where js-citeproc has a copy left license and some shortcomings (narrative citations do not work) so I'm currently implementing something similar my self.

I suspect that heirloom troff is what you want, but if you’re targeting the browser, there’s also Scribble/Pollen?

http://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile

So, it's like a Lisp version of JSX with less IDE support?

https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsx-latex

https://github.com/schibsted/jsx-pdf

JSX in Lisp is "hello world"-level code. It's trivial enough that it hardly deserves a name/acronym.

This is more like multitarget document compiler. Or (a subset of) the output side of Pandoc.

> RSS 2.0 (aka. Really Simple Syndication) is supported as an input syntax. To use it, just pass --reader=rss-2 to the compiler. This makes it possible to generate Skribilo documents from RSS 2.0 feeds, which can be useful or at least funny.

Also a potential security hole, as it would be converting text+metadata into executable code in a Turing-complete language.

This looks cool, it's a shame guile doesn't compile for mingw64 for windows...

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