Sorry for a late reply. I really need to subscribe to this list.
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]
>
>
It seems like it might be worthwhile, but it's a bit of a daunting task.
>
> 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?
>
Maybe. I'm not sure there's a straightforward way for this.
+ a `pollen/template/latex` module that provides convenience functions for
> converting X-expressions to LaTeX?
>
This could be useful. You might get to an 80% solution with something like
a "latex-function-tag" for things that look like \tag{blah} and
"latex-environment-tag" for things that look like \begin{tag} blah blah
blah \end{tag}. The majority of my pollen tags boil down to one of those,
well for the environment, it often includes many of the "function" tags.
I'm sure I'm using the wrong name for "functions" there. Though, I have
used lots of attributes that end up some "raw" LaTeX that I'm not happy
with.
> + 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).
>
It's much more fun to write in Pollen and Racket.
>
> + As I show in the fourth tutorial, it's already possible to use the
> project server to generate LaTeX PDF previews. [1]
>
That works, but I feel that's a bit too much of a "proof-of-concept". My
set up is to run "make" that runs raco pollen render to generate the latex
files. Then I have
[latexmk](http://personal.psu.edu/jcc8//software/latexmk-jcc/) running in
the background that runs latex the correct number of times and open a PDF
viewer to show changes. Honesty, I've not found that solves the
multi-run/bibtex/biber issue of Latex as elegantly. It's about as good as I
can get at the moment. But yeah, I always have to have the same boilerplate
Makefile sitting around. I guess I'm betraying my Unix roots here.
>
> + 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.]
>
That's fine! Honestly, I write to conferences and they all have different
templates that I have to use. I normally create a .tex.pp file with the
proper preamble and the \input my actual text in. My template.tex.p just
dumps the output from pollen. This is about the equivalent of the HTML
workflow you present in the tutorials. This method works as I was able to
move a paper from three different templates with almost only touching the
.tex.pp file. There was some messing around with the abstract as each
template seems to want to do it differently, but I was able to abstract
that to two different functions.
> + What else? And is it worth doing?
>
Some basic stuff would be nice, but I'm not sure how comprehensive it will
ever be. I think there are too many packages out there for it ever to be
flawless. I remember my first time doing LaTeX was in
[LyX](http://www.lyx.org), which does it's darndest to keep you from having
to type LaTeX. But even there I had to use the RAW command to make
something work correctly. The advantage with pollen is that you basically
have that out of the box. I will say, I enjoy writing in Pollen much more
than writing in LaTeX.
Again sorry for the late response, but I hope it was helpful. I'm certainly
willing to expand on any of this.
--
Trenton
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