Re: [pollen] invitations for thoughts about the Pollen / LaTeX nexus

[Shrutarshi Basu]

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 (m...@mbtype.com) wrote:

True, though I see it as possibly analogous to Pollen's relationship to
HTML — when you're working with boilerplate structures (e.g.,  and )
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  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  wrote:

I suppose that, at best, Pollen could be a leaky abstraction—one would
still need to understand TeX and LaTeX.




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Re: [pollen] invitations for thoughts about the Pollen / LaTeX nexus

['Leandro Facchinetti' via Pollen]

> 1) There is a small set of recurring problems that arise with LaTeX, that 
> could maybe have common solutions.

Unfortunately, I feel like some of the issues that trouble me the most are out 
of Pollen’s reach. For example, positioning things in particular places on the 
page depends on TeX’s internal understanding of things (‘\textwidth’ and 
friends). And there’s no straightforward way to interact with information at 
this level but to use TeX.

That said, Pollen as it is does solve other pressing issues! For example, the 
arbitrary restriction of 9 arguments for a macro, the lack of named arguments, 
and so forth 

> + a `pollen/latex` dialect that converts LaTeX into X-expressions?

It’s possible to approximate this, and these approximations are useful. But, 
fun story, parsing TeX is undecidable 
.

> + 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.]

I like this philosophical purity. It’s why I use Pollen. When I want opinions 
and templates, I use Scribble (which comes with the best-looking HTML in the 
market ).

I suppose that, at best, Pollen could be a leaky abstraction—one would still 
need to understand TeX and LaTeX. I’m more interested in replacing the beast 
altogether, and have a PDF rendering engine interacting with Pollen directly. 
In other words, Quad!
-- 
Leandro Facchinetti 
https://www.leafac.com

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Re: [pollen] invitations for thoughts about the Pollen / LaTeX nexus

[Shrutarshi Basu]

Converting between LaTeX and X-expressions sounds like a good step forward.

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. For
example, this bug[1] in pandoc has been open for a while and on the face of
it should be easy to do. Perhaps it’s worth clarifying (with input from
interested users) what kinds of workflows or documents we're looking to
produce and try to figure out a set of technical challenges from there?

I’m an academic computer scientist and use LaTeX for pretty much any kind
of document I write that isn’t email or plain-text notes. I can imagine
doing plain text documents with a LaTeX-Pollen nexus might be fairly
straightforward, but for things involving diagrams, multiple columns,
tables etc., I’m not sure what a sufficiently productive path would be.

[1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/1023

On October 5, 2017 at 2:24:41 PM, Matthew Butterick (m...@mbtype.com) 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


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Re: [pollen] Seeking Advice re: Pollen

['Leandro Facchinetti' via Pollen]

My two cents.

I do something similar to Matthew: ‘.rkt’ in DrRacket and ‘.html.pm’ somewhere 
else (Atom with the language-pollen  
package).
-- 
Leandro Facchinetti 
https://www.leafac.com

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[pollen] invitations for thoughts about the Pollen / LaTeX nexus

[Matthew Butterick]

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
 


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[pollen] Re: Seeking Advice re: Pollen

[Matthew Butterick]

> On Oct 5, 2017, at 9:55 AM, George Cox  wrote:
> 
> Hi, I've stumbled across your "book-is-the-program" software Pollen and feel 
> it is a solution to something I've wanted for years. One quick question on 
> practical implementation:  Do you 'write' inside DrRacket, use a text editor, 
> or something else? I'm just curious what you find best ... based on your 
> experience.


Pollen source files are plain text. So you can use whatever text editor suits 
you, or switch among them.

Typically I use DrRacket for .rkt source files so I can test them more easily, 
and Sublime Text for "content" files (.html.pm etc.) written in the Pollen 
language. Those can also be run in DrRacket. But generally I prefer to look at 
the full preview in the project server.

There's also a clever in-browser editor called `pollen-rock` that you can add 
on to your Pollen installation:

https://pkgs.racket-lang.org/package/pollen-rock 


(Confidential to Junsong Li: perhaps consider adding some Scribble 
documentation with screen shots, so people who don't use Pollen yet can see how 
cool `pollen-rock` is ;)

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