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I'm working on converting a fiction ebook to web-based with Pollen and may later launch a fiction magazine using it, although I'm undecided about that technolog
by chipotle_coyote 12y ago
I'm working on converting a fiction ebook to web-based with Pollen and may later launch a fiction magazine using it, although I'm undecided about that technology choice.
I think Pollen's biggest strength is that you can reprogram its markup -- as its documentation puts it, you can attach behavior to tags. I haven't taken much advantage of that yet, but you can do things like create a "TOC" tag that builds a table of contents by inspecting child documents and looking for h1 tags (or looking for, say, "chapter" tags, which you've defined to expand to "<h1 class='chapter'>"), or inspect the contents of paragraphs and subtly shift the first line margin to the left if the first character is a quote mark (which Butterick's Practical Typography does). You could replicate some of that with a template language that allows user-definable tags, but I don't think you could do all of it.
Its biggest weakness, at least for me, has been finding a pleasant workflow. Despite having a built-in web server it feels kind of clunky compared to other static site generators. You're largely on your own for writing a deployment script ("raco pollen clone" is not a valid substitute). The DrRacket IDE is virtually a requirement for Racket programming, but it sucks teabags for editing long prose documents; you'll likely find yourself working in one editor for Racket language files and another for Pollen source. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, but it's at the least annoying.
- _djhrtmn 12y agoThanks for the response. I might try converting some public domain text to Pollen sometime, any tips for getting around DrRacket's short comings besides separating racket and pollen source?
- chipotle_coyote 12y agoThat's probably the main one, really. DrRacket really isn't a bad IDE -- it's not up to Emacs levels of programmable madness, but its keybindings are clearly inspired by Emacs and it has a lot of Lisp-aware functionality. But, its syntax highlighting engine seems to be very slow and hard to really turn off. If you are an Emacs fan, you can use it for Racket instead of DrRacket using Geiser and Quack, which might solve a lot of problems. (I've never tried it -- I'm comfortable with Emacs, but I've never loved the way it handles prose rather than code.)
- mbutterick 12y agoFWIW I go between DrRacket and Sublime Text as necessary. Sublime is of course faster for typical writing & editing tasks. But when working on code-related things, the DrRacket REPL is useful.
- chipotle_coyote 12y agoThat makes sense. I think I was using Sublime as well -- I experimented with making the world's hackiest syntax highlighting file to show embedded Pollen commands. (IIRC, Sublime was unamused with the notion of ".html.pmd" as a single extension.)