new Quad demo

[Matthew Butterick]

I've restored Quad to a state where it can be installed and demoed. Docs are here [1] and will continue to be expanded.

Quad is my Racket software for programmatically generating PDFs from markup, similar to how LaTeX works. It has been slow going because producing reasonable PDFs meant circumventing Racket's existing system for making them and building my own.

The focus of the demo is Quadwriter, a little word processor built on top of Quad, which lets you type into DrRacket and produce a PDF from what you see. 

As for cooperating with Pollen, Quadwriter takes what I'm calling a Q-expression as input (= a subset of X-expressions). So whereas today, your tag functions in a Pollen project might emit LaTeX code, instead they could emit Q-expressions, and then these would be passed to Quadwriter for final layout and PDF conversion.

I'm sharing Quad now because I'm at the point where I want to sort out the emerging public interface. I expect others may have good ideas, so I welcome suggestions, no matter how outlandish.

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/quad/index.html

[dueck...@gmail.com]

I’ve been looking at this just a little bit. I’m really excited that it’s moving along. 

From what I understand Quad/Quadwriter at this stage seems sort of analagous to TeX, which is kind of a low-level typesetting language that lets you plunk down individual text blocks on a page. (I have never tried learning TeX so I might be wrong about this)

Then in the TeX world LaTeX is a system of macros on top of TeX that let you more easily do higher-level typesetting tasks like adding different page headers/footers on recto/verso pages, automatic page numbering in various styles, set footnotes/endnotes, generate a table of contents or keyword index, etc.

Of course, those are the tasks I’m interested in eventually using Quad for. I’m hoping a Quad community will coalesce to write our own LaTeX equivalent packages.

Meanwhile for starters I’d just love to read more documentation about Q-expressions and some kind of module reference.

Very exciting!

[Matthew Butterick]

On Apr 27, 2019, at 4:05 PM, dueck...@gmail.com wrote:

From what I understand Quad/Quadwriter at this stage seems sort of analagous to TeX, which is kind of a low-level typesetting language that lets you plunk down individual text blocks on a page. (I have never tried learning TeX so I might be wrong about this)

Then in the TeX world LaTeX is a system of macros on top of TeX that let you more easily do higher-level typesetting tasks like adding different page headers/footers on recto/verso pages, automatic page numbering in various styles, set footnotes/endnotes, generate a table of contents or keyword index, etc.

That analogy seems mostly right, crawl before you can walk, etc.

Meanwhile for starters I’d just love to read more documentation about Q-expressions and some kind of module reference.

Yes, I'll add that next.