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I'm actually using pollen to create my online book[1] and it's been very good. While I write my blog in markdown it's super nice to be able to mix real code wi
by lawn 7y ago
I'm actually using pollen to create my online book[1] and it's been very good.
While I write my blog in markdown it's super nice to be able to mix real code with in your markup language. For example if you want to create a special layout for a specific page or if you want a table with subtly different properties than the rest, it's easy.
It's also very powerful to extend the markup itself. I added support for Tufte style sidenotes[2] which I use extensively throughout the book. This is the markup for the sidenotes:
Lisp is a pretty nice◊sn{cult} language.
◊ndef["cult"]{
Some may say it's the language to rule them all.
}
The way it uses X-expressions to represent text is really intuitive and easy to work with. I do think there's merit to do this in lisp instead of say Python, because the modeling maps so well to lisp.
[1]: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/ https://whycryptocurrencies.com/
[2]: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2019/03/04/pollen_sidenotes/ https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2019/03/04/pollen_sidenotes...
- gnomewascool 7y agoOff-topic: Your book looks lovely, very much in the style of practicaltypography.com. Perhaps I'll follow along, despite being, as you put it, a "cryptocurrency skeptic". I'm not sure if fixing this would look better than leaving it as it is (I'm not a typographer), but the "jumping" of the main body during the transitions to (and from) the rare pages that don't have side-notes, feels slightly jarring.
- lawn 7y agoThanks for the feedback! I didn't realize it before, but flipping through them I think you're right. I'll make sure to adjust them for consistency. Edit: Practical typography is obviously a big inspiration. I also use two of his fonts (Century Supra and Concourse).
- gnomewascool 7y agoFurther off-topic (from the main thread), but your blog Atom feed[0] seems to be slightly broken, due to an un-escaped, literal ampersand on line 687 (Tufte style sidenotes & marginnotes in Pollen). Presumably, it's a hakyll bug, as it should do the escaping for you. (Don't have time to dig further.) [0] https://www.jonashietala.se/feed.xml https://www.jonashietala.se/feed.xml
- lawn 7y agoThank you, it does seem to be a Hakyll bug which doesn't escape the '&' char properly.
- cdaringe 7y agoI read a few chapters. Well written!
- lawn 7y agoThanks for the kind words!