Writing a book - Pollen and/or Ormode's Babel

[Steve Graham]

I have started to write a book on programming using various languages to illustrate different concepts.  My plan has been to use orgmode's babel to produce the book because it enables you to actually execute code within a document and see the output -- either in the document or in a file -- and to publish the document.

I've also been reading about Pollen and have seen some videos of Matthew discussing Racket and Pollen and Beautiful Racket.  Other than that I don't know anything about Pollen.

Finally I would like to publish it in 3 formats:  Paperback, pdf and Kindle.

What are your thoughts about using orgmode versus Pollen for this project?


Thanks, Steve

[Matthew Butterick]

I've never used orgmode, so no comparative opinion there.

A Kindle is a fancy set of HTML pages, so that seems doable.

PDF is a precursor to paperback, so assuming you're satisfied with LaTeX output, that seems doable (again, I yield to Joel Dueck on these matters, who is on the cutting edge)

The evaluation part ... hmm. With Beautiful Racket I used pygments for all the syntax highlighting, which pipes code to a python process and gets a result. Similarly, you could make Pollen functions that send their input to an external process and then pop in the result. Don't know if the speed would be acceptable, but you could cache the results of these eval blocks, SMOP, etc.

Probably the best way to compare them is to put together a short sample and see which you prefer.

[Junsong Li]

Hi Steve,

 

Finally I would like to publish it in 3 formats:  Paperback, pdf and Kindle.

What are your thoughts about using orgmode versus Pollen for this project?

 

I used to use org-mode a lot.

I think org-mode is called a swiss knife not because it supports multiple publishing system, but because of Emacs the editor itself. All markup languages are ad-hoc, and ad-hoc languages are inconsistent, and fragile. I don't think I can still use my org file created five years ago because the incompatible features they may have introduced, but I believe I can still use my Pollen file twenty years later just because Racket as a language won't change much.

(yes, I am saying org-mode is an ad-hoc markup language happened to be supported by the most powerful editor. It got this nice interactive editing support on a unfortunate fragile base)

Pollen is something different from org-mode. It has this beautiful, consistent core, but few editing support, but we're trying to solve that; it should not hold you off; at least we've gotten DrRacket, a simple Emacs-mode, pollen-rock and soon Atom support.

(To me, Scribble and Pollen is done right just like scheme's static scope is done right over early lisp's dynamic scope. That IS an incredible achievement when I realize how many markup languages we have today, and how much time I've wasted trying those.)

Hopefully we will see you around in the forum :D

Junsong

[Steve Graham]

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Thanks, Matthew.  Good idea to compare them with a short sample.

Not sure where to report a bug in try-pollen or if I should just report it to you or to Joel too.  But when I cloned your version and ran make all, I got an error:  

! fontspec error: "font-not-found"
!
! The font "Adobe Caslon Pro" cannot be found.


Steve

[Joel Dueck]

I have a note on this buried in the README file in the original repo:

“You may want to edit the fonts specified in the \setromanfont and \setmonofont commands in template.ltx.p, template.pdf.p and flatland/flatland-book.ltx.pp; I have them set to Adobe Caslon Pro and Triplicate, respectively, so if you don't have those fonts installed you will get errors.”

[Steve Graham]

Thanks, Joel.  Steve

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