MB has done an amazing job at creating an identity. It seems that some content of his stirs up small controversy on this forum, and while I can't pick apart the minutiae, it's clear on a high level that he has really made a place for himself as a person in the digital world. His work is interesting and beautiful, and is all related in a way that make it clear that he has a theme or drive which he is fulfilling.<p>From pollen to practical typography to his fonts and back to racket lessons. While I don't know the timeline of publishing, it seems each fit as a part of his path towards a goal, and he did the reader a service by publishing the meta-work. I see his racket lessons and pollen as the side result of goal to write his books, and so then became works themselves.
I'm actually using pollen to create my online book[1] and it's been very good.<p>While I write my blog in markdown it's super nice to be able to mix real code with in your markup language. For example if you want to create a special layout for a specific page or if you want a table with subtly different properties than the rest, it's easy.<p>It's also very powerful to extend the markup itself. I added support for Tufte style sidenotes[2] which I use extensively throughout the book. This is the markup for the sidenotes:<p><pre><code> Lisp is a pretty nice◊sn{cult} language.
◊ndef["cult"]{
Some may say it's the language to rule them all.
}
</code></pre>
The way it uses X-expressions to represent text is really intuitive and easy to work with. I do think there's merit to do this in lisp instead of say Python, because the modeling maps so well to lisp.<p>[1]: <a href="https://whycryptocurrencies.com/" rel="nofollow">https://whycryptocurrencies.com/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2019/03/04/pollen_sidenotes/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2019/03/04/pollen_sidenotes...</a>
I’ve been using Pandoc + Markdown + Latex & friends for a personal project, and at least to me, it seems like a great combo. Prose can be prose, without markup interfering. Macros make it easy to separate style, and build consistent structure, and there are oodles of tools in the Tex ecosystem for just about any typographic need you might have. Add Tex.stackexchange and a build system (I use make) and it’s pretty easy to set up a great looking book and and environment that allows you to focus on the content while having all of the bells and whistles (bibliography, index, etc.).<p>I do like the idea of having the ability to manipulate an AST of the book’s contents. Sometimes it’s difficult to do free-form text manipulation in Latex, which means solving the problem in other ways.
While this looks impressive, I think "programming a book" is still too tricky for authors.<p>Repeating syntax and formatting books is hard, but authors struggle the most with writers block, creating stories, sourcing content for nonfiction, etc. Once much of this hard work is done, a lot of the good ones will partially hand off formatting to an editor/publisher. Of course they'll work closely with them, but whether that work is done in MS Word vs a Programming language is the secondary.<p>The majority of these docs are clearly aimed at programmers who are interested in MB's though process and why the data model is clean, as opposed to what life of an average author (or best-selling author) looks like, and how the tools will help them write better books.<p>Wishing the best for this project. Perhaps a version of it could be sold to publishers?
I've been frustrated for years by the problem of producing paged media (e.g. stuff that is supposed to go on paper) through open source means. Yes, there's Tex and its ilk, which is a great typesetting software, but hard to learn, and hard to adapt (in my opinion). Then there are expensive commercial options.<p>Currently I think the best solution is a headless browser, I use chromium+puppet, plus polyfills like paged.js. Now I can finally have most of the CSS paged media features, including page references.<p>Then there is the topic of word hyphenation. Chrome technically supports it through CSS, but in practice that is harder to achieve, afaik due to problems with distributing the dictionaries. There are again polyfills. I also think there should be a way to train a neural net on existing hyphenations to hyphenate virtually anything else in a sensible fashion, including fantasy words.<p>Without hyphenation, text justification doesn't work properly. It's also a good way to save space in tabular layouts, even if just for display on-screen.
> “Sounds a lot like LaTeX. Why not use that?” Also a good idea. LaTeX gets a lot of things right. But it’s also missing a lot — for instance, Unicode and web publishing.<p>Xe(La)TeX has been around for a while[0] and allows for Unicode.<p>[0] 2004 for Mac, and 2007 cross-platform.
It's missing a clear description what those "unique features" are, both from using Racket and to a visitor considering using it. In short, the site doesn't sell properly.
Alternatives in the Python world include Jupyter notebooks and Sphinx.<p>Both have tons of extensions for including all sorts of media and content you need, including musical charts, maps, formulas, plots, tables etc., and can be extended to include virtually everything you want.<p>The route from Sphinx/Jupyter to pdf/prints leads either via LaTex or via a headless browser. The latter option seems to have more potential though. HTML+JS now can render anything. Including rendering math formulas, 3D graphics, still shots from videos.
Does anyone know of anything similar in a more popular language, like Python?<p>In particular, what I dislike about all other static generators is they come with their own templating language, which is usually limited, stupid and broken in various ways. I just want to mix Python and Markdown, but have the code replaced with its output, to make it easy to build more complicated structures.<p>Maybe I'll just write something myself...
Terence Parr's 'bookish' is worth a look too, for those wanting to stick to markdown + embedded LaTeX<p><a href="https://github.com/parrt/bookish" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/parrt/bookish</a>
I got excited for a second thinking this was a reference to the book Pollen by Jeff Noon and some heretofore unknown embedded program. Anyways the Vurt series was way ahead of its time.