I’m going out on a limb here, (because I don’t really much about how LaTeX works), but I think the fundamental problem is that both Pollen and HTML are fundamentally semantic: there is some *meaning *to the tags and how they are structured and nested in a document. How things should then be displayed is (at least ideally) connected to the semantic structure of the document. By contrast, LaTeX strikes me as being fundamentally presentational. Sure, there are constructs for sections, lists, etc., but when you get beyond the basics, the commands are more geared towards having close(-ish) control over how things are laid out on the page.
Now, all that’s not to say that we shouldn’t explore the Pollen/LaTeX connection, and I would be really happy if there’s a happy middle somewhere. Perhaps being aware of the difference in their different points of view might help going forward? On October 5, 2017 at 5:51:06 PM, Matthew Butterick ([email protected]) wrote: True, though I see it as possibly analogous to Pollen's relationship to HTML — when you're working with boilerplate structures (e.g., <p> and <br>) you can let Pollen take care of them. But when you want to insert literal chunks of markup because of their specialness or complexity, you can do that too. OTOH, you're right that finding a productive level of abstraction to aim for in the software is an open question (and one I don't feel qualified to answer). On Oct 5, 2017, at 12:48 PM, Shrutarshi Basu <[email protected]> wrote: As a meta-point though, In my personal experience, X-as-a-LaTeX-front-end breaks down really easily when trying to do something non-trivial. On Oct 5, 2017, at 1:10 PM, Leandro Facchinetti <[email protected]> wrote: I suppose that, at best, Pollen could be a leaky abstraction—one would still need to understand TeX and LaTeX. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pollen" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pollen" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
