4 ms·

I only interact with tex and latex through pollen these days. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ It doesn't shield you f

I only interact with tex and latex through pollen these days. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ It doesn't shield you from much of the pain, initially at least. But you can separate it from the document and treat it as markup, and reuse bits more easily. Of course pollen itself is a thing to learn. But if you work with text a lot and like lisp it might be worth it. It's been good to me.

sph 4y ago
I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche, complicated for its own good IMO. Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp. #lang latex (documentclass "article") (document (section "Chapter 1") Welcome to (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.) How does this not exist yet??
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah it is kind of surprising. Scribble supports latex output but I don't know the details and it's probably similar to pollen, since pollen is built on it. It doesn't seem that hard (famous last words tho) especially since turning arbitrary DSLs into xexprs is one of the things racket truly excels at.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    Just having proper semantic closing syntax would be a huge improvement for any member of the TeX family. It drives me nuts wrestling with shit falling into or out of some macro expanded function based on argument parsing logic. If it had defined closing syntax the damn tools would just tell me there was a mistake or get it correct not mysteriously screw up my document because I added or removed one row from my document. Or my favourite because I added a second table and that macro could only handle one table of that kind per document because it was designed for a table based bibliography that would only exist once at the end of a document… I put TeX and Perl in my “decent tool with extremely shitty syntax” mental categorisation of languages. I basically never look at anything TeX related directly anymore unless I have to. It’s either the input material I converted to something better like plain text or vector graphics (fuck Tkiz based graphics are so miserable to use) or it’s the output from putting something more sensible into pandoc.

sph 4y ago

I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche, complicated for its own good IMO. Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp. #lang latex (documentclass "article") (document (section "Chapter 1") Welcome to (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.) How does this not exist yet??

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yeah it is kind of surprising. Scribble supports latex output but I don't know the details and it's probably similar to pollen, since pollen is built on it. It doesn't seem that hard (famous last words tho) especially since turning arbitrary DSLs into xexprs is one of the things racket truly excels at.
- techdragon 4y ago
  Just having proper semantic closing syntax would be a huge improvement for any member of the TeX family. It drives me nuts wrestling with shit falling into or out of some macro expanded function based on argument parsing logic. If it had defined closing syntax the damn tools would just tell me there was a mistake or get it correct not mysteriously screw up my document because I added or removed one row from my document. Or my favourite because I added a second table and that macro could only handle one table of that kind per document because it was designed for a table based bibliography that would only exist once at the end of a document… I put TeX and Perl in my “decent tool with extremely shitty syntax” mental categorisation of languages. I basically never look at anything TeX related directly anymore unless I have to. It’s either the input material I converted to something better like plain text or vector graphics (fuck Tkiz based graphics are so miserable to use) or it’s the output from putting something more sensible into pandoc.