
How to make a book with Pollen - lobo_tuerto
http://pollenpub.com/
======
aaronbasssett
I have no idea what Pollen does. The homepage really doesn't explain anything,
and even after skimming the tutorials and the quick tour I still don't know.

Is it a static site generator? A blogging engine? Does it create PDFs? Epub? I
have no idea.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
The first sentence of the documentation tells you:

"Pollen is a publishing system that helps authors create beautiful and
functional web-based books."

I think it might be good to get something like that on that introductory page,
though, you're right.

~~~
michael_storm
Which could be, as the GP said, a static site generator, blogging engine,
ePubs, etc.

If your one-line intro for anything includes the word "system", stop and
rewrite. For example:

 _Pollen helps authors create beautiful and functional web-based books that
are written as programs that generate HTML._

Never-have-I-ever seen anything that confuses "feature" and "benefit" so much
as this project. _Why_ do I want my next book to be a program? A 20-minute
video explaining it is almost condescending.

~~~
userbinator
_If your one-line intro for anything includes the word "system", stop and
rewrite._

Or "solution", for that matter; regardless of whether "enterprise" is also
present.

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dsr_
I don't think I can forgive the use of ◊ as an escape character, though. It is
not on any commonly used keyboard, so unless the intent was to make users
avoid it as much as possible, it's just too awful to put up with.

~~~
Tomte
You can define the command character to be anything you like by setting a
single variable.

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omaranto
Is there any written discussion of advantages that Pollen has over racket
Scribble? It sounds extremely similar.

~~~
Semiapies
In the documentation.

It's built on top of Scribble.

~~~
omaranto
I knew it was built on top of scribble, I was looking for a concise
description of why it was built at all (instead of just using scribble
directly).

------
macmac
Please note that on OSX you have to manually add the Racket binaries to your
path. If you use zsh and Racket v6.2 for instance you could add the following
to your .zshrc: export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Racket\ v6.2/bin

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weeksie
Man, I feel out of touch. Dr. Scheme is now called Racket?

I'll crawl back under my rock. . . .

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criddell
I've been thinking about Pollen a little bit lately after reading about it
when I was researching Racket and domain specific languages (DSL's).

Would it be wrong to call Pollen a DSL?

~~~
Semiapies
It's absolutely a DSL.

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vermontdevil
It's web based book

here's an book published by the author/developer to get the idea.

[http://practicaltypography.com](http://practicaltypography.com)

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pseingatl
It needs a front end. If this is the web version of TeX, it needs LaTeX and
TeXshop or Kile. You're not suggesting that text be originally written in
Pollen, are you?

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asimjalis
How is this better or different from Pandoc?

~~~
qznc
Different.

Pandoc is about reading lots of formats (eg Markdown) and writing lots of
formats (eg epub, pdf, html). It has enough config options that you can
reasonably produce books with it.

Pollen is like TeX. It has one input format, which is a Turing-complete
programming language. It can output a limited number of formats. You have much
more control about the output than with Pandoc, so can do visually pleasing
typography.

------
jimhefferon
Is there any way to include a good amount of mathematical text?

~~~
oandrei
I developed this: [http://andreimikhailov.com/slides/bystroTeX/slides-
manual/in...](http://andreimikhailov.com/slides/bystroTeX/slides-
manual/index.html) and it seems to work, for example:
[http://andreimikhailov.com/teaching/gdmc/exterior-
calculus/i...](http://andreimikhailov.com/teaching/gdmc/exterior-
calculus/index.html) I wish I had time to polish it more. It is also Scribble,
but unrelated to Pollen.

