I'm very non-technical about either pollen and LaTeX, but maybe I could present my use case as food for thoughts? I use LaTeX to typeset my (French) high-school math course material so it looks good, or at least better than copy and paste pdf's and word documents. I've created a Frankenstein's monster of a template, based on the "memoir" package that allows me to: - have a consistent look and feel across lessons, exercise sets and exam questions (based on - what else - Tufte's narrow text column and wide margins) - create variant exam questions in a single document. ,including solution sets to be printed or not according to a main switch - use French typographical rules (because I'm pedantic that way)
I'm using XeTeX so I can repurpose my computer's ttf / otf fonts (in this instance Hoeffler text) instead of the very dated LaTeX cm fonts What I'm missing, and was sort of toying with pollen for, is the ability to put all of this on a (elegant) class website as HTML instead of dumping pdf's for my students on the school's IT portal. Ideally, I could even create online exercise sets for them to hand in. The core LaTeX usage is obviously math / equation typesetting, and I guess that's what we're - mostly - talking about when discussing pollen / LaTeX integration. An interesting tool to look at here might be LaTeXit! which comes with my TeXLive distribution: it creates either an image (svg, png etc ...) or a pdf of a snippet of pure LaTex (eg mostly an equation), to be included in another document. The LaTeX packages / extensions which could conceivably be replaced by pollen are (in my usage): * the memoir package - essentially an extra layer over latex to make it easier to specify document typography (headers, footers, captions, font sizes etc ...) * the babel package - to localize the typographical rules (in my case to French: for example a small space before : and ?, quotes are «» , hyphenation rules etc ...) * the fontspec / mathspec packages to specify fonts * the xsim package for exercise / solution logic inside the document (yes, I'm programming my LaTeX documents ...) * the extools package for minimal if / then logic using true/false switches ... * a bunch of other tools to make tables and headers etc look nice ... A special mention for the series of ams packages (amsmath, amssymb) for maths typesetting rules (aligning sets of equations nicely etc ...). They are a core part of pretty much any LaTeX document that tackles equations etc ... so they should be considered the part of LaTeX that would be kept "as is" at the core of the math-typesetting engine. Another huge set of tools I use in LaTeX is the pgf / tikz graphical language. The allow me to draw my maths figures (relatively) simply from inside the latex document, without having to create separate files. However, there are so many good tools available that we could possibly find another way to do this. I'd love to be able to integrate figures from GeoGebra for example, which would allow for inclusion of dynamic snippets inside the webpage, with a static "image" to replace them when printing the pollen document. Hope this helps to foster some thoughts. As I said, this is my usage and I've mostly patched it up from Things That Work™ by colleagues. While I mostly know how it works and can repair things that break - I'm really not that good at how it works under the hood. As for the "is it worth doing" : YES - being able to simultaneously present a dynamic site that doesn't break when printed out as handouts would be invaluable for teachers (and probably not only maths ...) On Thursday, October 5, 2017 at 8:24:41 PM UTC+2, Matthew Butterick wrote: > > I know that more than a few Pollen users (Pollenizers?) use it as a front > end to LaTeX. > > I don't use LaTeX in any deep way so I've not really considered the > Pollen–LaTeX interaction deeply. > > OTOH it seems like: > > 1) There is a small set of recurring problems that arise with LaTeX, that > could maybe have common solutions. > > 2) if Pollen had better LaTeX support, I'm sure it would bring more mildly > dissatisfied LaTeX users* across to Pollen > > [* in other words, all of them] > > > The question, which I can't really answer, is what form this should take. > From my dumb-person's understanding of LaTeX it would probably mean a set > of independent components: > > + a `pollen/latex` dialect that converts LaTeX into X-expressions? > > + a `pollen/template/latex` module that provides convenience functions for > converting X-expressions to LaTeX? > > + Obviously, Pollen/Racket would automatically add a lot of > programmability to LaTeX (no one seems to dispute that while LaTeX is > programmable, it should never actually be programmed). > > + As I show in the fourth tutorial, it's already possible to use the > project server to generate LaTeX PDF previews. [1] > > + Though I've been reluctant to put self-contained templates into Pollen, > I also recognize that a huge number of LaTeX users just rely on those six > default templates that it's had since 1979 or whatever. So it would make > sense to make it easy to use those templates in Pollen (though maybe that's > better put into a separate add-on library, so that my philosophical purity > is preserved.** > > [** No. The real reason I've avoided putting readymade templates in Pollen > is because I don't want to attract people who really want a turnkey system > like Squarespace or WordPress.] > > + What else? And is it worth doing? > > > [1] > http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/fourth-tutorial.html#%28part._.Adding_support_for_.P.D.F_output%29 > > <http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/fourth-tutorial.html#(part._.Adding_support_for_.P.D.F_output)> > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pollen" group. 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