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Comment by mbutterick | Hacker News Reader

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 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. Especially the basic notion that a book (or other publication) should be represented as a program, and that authors should be able to freely intermix text and code. With digital books, I think it's essential.

(PS on Racket: HN was built with Arc, which was also built with Racket.)

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Matthew: interesting project, thank you for releasing it.

I've always thought lisps were a natural fit for this sort of thing; the cl-typesetting project (http://www.fractalconcept.com/asp/cl-typesetting) didn't get a lot of traction but was pretty effective, are/were you aware of that one?

Any intention to tackle higher quality typesetting for hardcopy/pdf ?

"(...) 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, 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].

[1] http://xkcd.com/927/

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 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.

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 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-...

Some parts of TeX and LaTeX translate directly into a web setting, and I imagine it would be pretty straightforward to write an interpreter in Pollen/Racket that can process those parts of LaTeX files (cross references, bibliography management, etc). The rest is page layout and typography, which is what Pollen's for.

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)

Well, you can make dvi and convert it into svg with dvisvgm; taking the inconsistent, usually terrible browser rendering and absolute lack of a proper typesetting in HTML into account this is probably the only way to achieve a nice web-published text (;

The bit in the book / manual about typing a "lozenge" character that shows how with an Apple then has two blank lines for windows and linux is a little disconcerting.

As with any unusual character in Windows, you seem to be pretty much stuck with "build and install a new keyboard layout" as the general solution, though there may be editor-specific alternatives.

Indeed. Fixed!

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