I’m always looking out for digital book publishing systems. This article invites me to check out three books published using Pollen. It then asks two questions.
> Are they better than the last digital books you encountered?
Sadly, they aren’t. One lacks any navigation on the pages. The others have some navigation, but lack an accessible TOC on the page for context, something I have come to expect from digital books. Furthermore there is no way to search the contents of the book. This is a non-negotiable in my book. Pun intended. :)
Also missing, is any other format, such as PDF and ePub, which is also a deal-breaker for me, as I want my books to work for as wide an audience as possible.
> Would you like your next digital book to work like that?
No thanks. But the design is nice. I hope the system keeps improving.
Pollen is great. I wish it was more widely used. One of the only reasons I don't use it for most things is that adding the whole of Racket as a dependency comes across as a little much.
One of my "one day..." projects is to try and reimplement a subset of Pollen using https://github.com/racket/zuo which I think would make it much easier to integrate as a much smaller dependency. But maybe the whole "ease of use" budget is blown by using a Lisp in the first place. :)
In any case, if you've ever had to write a technical manual before (or some kind of heavy technical reference), I think you should give Pollen a try. It has much more general answers to a lot of problems you encounter when writing complex web documents. It is an interesting, useful, and pragmatic point in the design space, IMO.
I haven't used Racket much since the CS rewrite, but it's slimmer now, isn't it? I remember Racket feeling a bit chunky when I was using it more, years ago, but I thought part of the rewrite was to address that (among all the other benefits).
Can it generate PDF / e-books? The author seems to be against both, at least for their own books, but my e-book reader cannot read websites conveniently.
I’m always looking out for digital book publishing systems. This article invites me to check out three books published using Pollen. It then asks two questions.
> Are they better than the last digital books you encountered?
Sadly, they aren’t. One lacks any navigation on the pages. The others have some navigation, but lack an accessible TOC on the page for context, something I have come to expect from digital books. Furthermore there is no way to search the contents of the book. This is a non-negotiable in my book. Pun intended. :)
Also missing, is any other format, such as PDF and ePub, which is also a deal-breaker for me, as I want my books to work for as wide an audience as possible.
> Would you like your next digital book to work like that?
No thanks. But the design is nice. I hope the system keeps improving.
Pollen is great. I wish it was more widely used. One of the only reasons I don't use it for most things is that adding the whole of Racket as a dependency comes across as a little much.
One of my "one day..." projects is to try and reimplement a subset of Pollen using https://github.com/racket/zuo which I think would make it much easier to integrate as a much smaller dependency. But maybe the whole "ease of use" budget is blown by using a Lisp in the first place. :)
In any case, if you've ever had to write a technical manual before (or some kind of heavy technical reference), I think you should give Pollen a try. It has much more general answers to a lot of problems you encounter when writing complex web documents. It is an interesting, useful, and pragmatic point in the design space, IMO.
I haven't used Racket much since the CS rewrite, but it's slimmer now, isn't it? I remember Racket feeling a bit chunky when I was using it more, years ago, but I thought part of the rewrite was to address that (among all the other benefits).
There is a minimal Racket distribution which should be a lot lighter. CS has made the code base cleaner and Racket zippier.
Butterick is a sharp guy. I absolutely love one of the books he made with Pollen: Practical Typography http://practicaltypography.com/
Pollen seems like a power tool; my needs are largely met by Scribble, but I’d like to get more comfortable with Pollen.
Can it generate PDF / e-books? The author seems to be against both, at least for their own books, but my e-book reader cannot read websites conveniently.
https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/fourth-tutorial.html#(pa...
What is the difference between a publishing system and a type setting system? Am I able to output tables and what would he the syntax?
For tables, Pollen supports both the Markdown table syntax, and straight-up HTML, which should fit the need easily enough.