
Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system - ulrikrasmussen
http://patoline.org/
======
jwr
I'm very glad people are doing this. The local maximum created by TeX (and its
surroundings), while producing impressive output, has kept many people from
developing any typesetting software. It was usually easier to learn how to
trick TeX into doing what you wanted, or build yet another overlay on top of
it.

A similar local maximum exists with Emacs (you might also call it a local
energy minimum, as it requires less energy to hack Emacs into doing what you
want than to write a whole new system). This has also held back editor
development for years (if not decades), but recently we started seeing
attempts at breaking out (LightTable is one example).

This is an interesting phenomenon: neither TeX nor Emacs are bad, in fact they
are both impressive pieces of software. But we could do better now, and yet we
usually don't even start, because it is such a daunting task, and it is easier
to extend existing solutions.

Best of luck to authors and contributors to this project!

~~~
mtdewcmu
Your emacs analogy has issues -- vim is another programmable editor alongside
emacs. And IDEs, especially ones like Eclipse, have similar complexity behind
a graphical interface. Should languages be replaced, or is it better that they
just grow and adapt? Look at the scale of the energy minimum around English.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The communities that back vim and emacs would never allow for evolution in the
direction of light table or any of the other reinvent IDE projects; heck, they
can't break out of their terminal/ASCII mindset for the most part.
Technologically they could, but the community has bought into a certain set of
principles that work well but don't allow for much deviation. So new projects
come along and deviate from entrenched principles, sometimes in successful
ways.

English is quite different, it changes with time and even place.

~~~
sergiosgc
Terminal as a first level interface is not a vim mindset. It's a use case. The
primary use case.

------
Argorak
The about page gives me no idea of what it is, especially as someone who knows
TeX quite well. It starts with the single mistake all of those pages do: "It's
like A, but with B!" On top of that, B is already in A. Typesetting with
scripting? LuaTex (actually quite easy, if you know the typesetting
surroundings). More layout control? ConTeXt.

The biggest hurdle in all those systems is understanding what typesetting
actually is (in contrast to content editing or especially programming). It
comes with a completely different vocabulary. What's a strut?[1] What's a
quad?[2] What are the standard elements of typography and page layout? How are
fonts measured?

Finally: how does the system manage forward compatibility (can I still compile
my document from 5 years ago?) - scripting and modularity are features that
have to be evaluated under all those regards.

Also, I am very surprised that code examples in the reference documentation
look horrible. Isn't that what the system is there for?

That said: I love that there is competition in that space. TeX is great and
will be around for a few decades, but that doesn't mean there can't be others.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strut_%28typesetting%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strut_%28typesetting%29)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_%28typography%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_%28typography%29)

~~~
tekacs
> Can I still compile my document from 5 years ago?

Well on the About page it does have the FAQ:

> Can I use Patoline for a huge, ten years long project that I'm starting now?

> Although one of the authors has written his PhD. thesis (120 pages, in
> computer science) with it, we don't recommend it now. The reason for this is
> that small adjustements and bugfixes are being made all the time, and
> working on such an unstable system can be frustrating. However, for
> documents that are not meant to last forever in time, we would be happy to
> help you with it: feel free to contact us for help.

> Stay tuned: we do plan to release a long term supported version of Patoline
> soon.

~~~
Argorak
This was an example question.

The problem is wide, that's why I was asking about _forward compatibility_.
Even if I have long term support, what happens if that runs out? How does that
work in the presence of scripting and extensions?

TeX has a whole culture around that - even if there are no long term releases,
it is _very stable_.

For example, the LPPL even prohibited releasing changed files under the same
name for a long time!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License)

------
tinco
It uses the same archaic syntax as TeX :( I was hoping they would come up with
something nice and modern like Markdown.

It seems like a cool project, OCaml is probably a fine choice although I've
never used it. But there are a few smells. The first to me was him mentioning
the project had 100.000 lines already. Now if this was C I could see why. But
this is a modern functional language. There's no 10.000 line rolled out
parsers, no hundreds of specialised general libraries.

Why is the project 100k lines? Is it an unmaintainable behemoth already?

~~~
pling
a) markdown isn't expressive enough. In fact it's pretty horrendous to edit
and separate content and layout IMHO. I'd go as far to say I prefer docbook
over markdown. It's fine for github readme's but not typesetting.

b) the problem is complicated. Complicated problems need lots of lines of
code. 100kloc isn't much. The thing I'm working on has 5.2Mloc and took 25
people 20 years to write. To the layman it probably looks like it does less
than this typesetter meaning it's a bad metric to use.

My MacTeX installation is about 1300Mb if that's any gauge.

~~~
mangecoeur
Or, it could be that TeX has been cobbled together over decades with little
design guidance or vision, resulting in a mishmash of approaches and
inefficient code.

To me almost everything in TeX feels like a hack, even if the fundamental idea
is good and the sum of all hacks ends up looking pretty good. The fact that
it's a huge hack that takes 1.3GBs to install is not a gauge of quality.

~~~
Argorak
The full TeXLive is 1.3GB large, because it ensures that the only thing you
need to build any semi-sane TeX document is this installation.

Describing TeX as Code misses the topic by a wide margin, a lot of the things
in the distribution are fonts and compiled versions of the documentation.

Bash the idea of treating TeX as code out of your head and you will find it
quite a bit saner.

~~~
mangecoeur
I don't think anything will ever convince me Tex is a sane design. For
instance, this SO on trying to set a5 paper size:

[https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/22917/a5paper-
settin...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/22917/a5paper-setting-not-
taking-effect)

(If you thought setting a5paper would result in your output paper size being
A5, think again. _facepalm_ )

------
yannis
To quote Knuth [1] describing TeX “Think thrice before extending,” because
that may save a lot of work, and it will also keep incompatible extensions of
TeX from proliferating.

Personally, I am of the opinion that the original TeX was well 'modularized'
in 'Pascal Procedures' [1], being Turing complete, extensions such as the
LaTeX format and the countless of packages after that helped it survive and
prosper. Think of a macro that you define as an easier way than programming a
module in JavaScript and it doesn't need a half a dozen tools to set it up.

    
    
        \def\#1{\TeX\ is alive says #1.}
    

Nevertheless, provided the lessons learned are incorporated I applaud any new
initiatives in more modern languages. Whatever is produced will however, need
to be able to parse TeX, otherwise it will not be easily adopted by the
community.

[1] [http://www.tug.org/texlive//devsrc/Master/texmf-
dist/doc/gen...](http://www.tug.org/texlive//devsrc/Master/texmf-
dist/doc/generic/knuth/tex/tex.pdf)

~~~
JadeNB
> Whatever is produced will however, need to be able to parse TeX, otherwise
> it will not be easily adopted by the community.

This is a huge barrier to raise, since _parsing_ TeX is the same as
_typesetting_ TeX—the meaning of a macro later on can be affected by a macro
now. You can't even just execute the macros in a vacuum, since the meaning of
a macro can depend on things like the current page number.

------
todd8
The insight (made here by jwr) that TeX and Emacs and Vim are local maximums
is a great observation that explains why we are stuck with these three
programs. I've used these programs for over a quarter of a century and often
wished for shiny, new replacements. Younger HN readers may not realize just
how old these programs are.

How in the world did Bill Joy come up with Vi in 1976? It lives on today as
the velociraptor of editors, Bram Moolenaar's Vim. I use the T. Rex of
editors, Stallman's Gnu Emacs, another dinosaur of software, yet unsurpassed
in scope and capability. These are great at what they do and so flexible and
extensible that it's difficult for any new project to catch up.

TeX is different. Knuth, one of the greatest computer scientists of all time,
created TeX. His choices for development tools were meager, but with the help
of /literate programming/, essentially invented by Knuth to write TeX, he
wrote TeX using the Pascal programming language in the late 1970s.

TeX, like Emacs and Vi/Vim, has an extension language. TeX has a powerful
macro system that allows it to be extended. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that
most users use to create documents. The number of macro packages written for
TeX to support every imaginable kind of typesetting (chess notation and
boards, music, etc.) is staggering. This accounts for the large size of TeX
installations. One can easily download and install every package ever
available and be ready to typeset anything. The core TeX program, however, is
composed of 1376 extremely well documented paragraphs (small code fragments).
It is a pleasure to read through Knuth's literate code, all available as a
beautiful book (naturally typeset in TeX).

The features of TeX were effectively frozen in 1985. Knuth kept track of every
error in TeX during its development. Since 1985 there have been less than 100
errors found in TeX [1].

The open-source communities around TeX (and Emacs and Vim) make it is
difficult for any new project to develop the features that make it worth
switching. This is the uphill climb that is facing Patoline. Will it succeed?
I'm not sure because many others have tried and failed. Lout was a really good
attempt [2], but it seems to have lost steam [3].

[1] [http://texdoc.net/texmf-
dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorl...](http://texdoc.net/texmf-
dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorlog.pdf) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_\(software\))
[3] [https://www.ohloh.net/p/lout](https://www.ohloh.net/p/lout)

~~~
hyperbovine
I would argue it's not so much the community (I'll bet there are maybe a dozen
people who understand the source well enough to improve it) so much as the
fact that TeX is feature complete, essentially bug free, and written by a
genius. It really is an amazing piece of software which has no equal, even if
you wanted to spend thousands of dollars. Why are we intent on replacing it
again? I understand the gripes about the language, the error messages, and so
forth. So design something that compiles down to TeX, not unlike what the
Java(Script) people have done. Reinventing TeX just seems like an exercise in
futility. (Nice duck logo though.)

~~~
thinkalone
The duck is a (mistaken) interpretation of an early French automaton:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck)

------
ShellfishMeme
I'd recommend adding some more information on the index page. When I arrived I
tried to scroll down hoping to find out what this is about, but instead I had
to go to the 'about' page myself.

Then I tried to read the 'about' page but the text is very small and the lines
very long, so it's hard to scan for relevant information. The bullet points
make a couple of claims about what Patoline excels at, but still no code
examples can be seen that could give me a feel for how Patoline actually
works.

I had to go to 'documentation' and click a small insignificant looking link to
actually get to see an explanation of Patoline and some code examples... in a
PDF file.

I understand that it's cool to write the tool's manual using the tool itself,
but if I come to the website and want to evaluate quickly whether this is
interesting and could replace LaTeX for me, I need a quick overview directly
on the index page, together with some examples similar to the one on the
wikipedia LaTeX page
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Examples)).

~~~
Argorak
It's not only cool, the documentation is the primary test case for many of
those projects.

------
Signez
Using OCaml and darcs won't help this project to find contributors outside
French academic world. It's unfortunate, IMHO.

------
silentvoice
Will it work sanely with Make, handle modular documents better than TeX, etc?
The biggest frustration with me and TeX isn't the quality of its output or its
extendability, it's simply difficult for me to work it into a reproducible
workflow without a lot of effort on my part.

With all of my tools that I use that somehow depend on each other I can always
glue together the results of my work with one tool to the input of another
tool via Make, minimizing human error in translating results over myself, but
LaTeX (combined with tools like BibTeX) somehow always breaks this model,
which can be very frustrating since LaTeX is such an important component of
mathematics research.

------
waynecochran
It's going to take da Vinci like talent and a herculean effort and to build
anything 10% as good a TeX. Knuth, the pre-eminent computer scientist, devoted
10 years of his life to type setting to create MetaFont and TeX. Being able to
"write scripts" for it ain't enough. Anyway... prove me wrong.

~~~
rst
A lot of that time went into the development of not the code per se, but
algorithms that newer code could reimplement. Perhaps in simpler forms on
newer machines. Conventional TeX has a hard time optimizing placement of page
breaks because its data structures hold only one page at a time, and discard
its contents before starting the next, due to memory limitations of computers
from the 1980s. Those limits no longer apply, which could make it a lot easier
to code strategies for eliminating "widows" and "orphans" \-- situetions in
which only one line of a paragraph is stuck at the top or bottom of a page.

------
seanmcdirmid
I think if someone was to redo TeX, that it would be really nice to see an
incremental type setting system. That means modularity not just at the code
level, but also with respect to how the run-time data structures are dependent
on each other, and the ability to "reflow" text on a change in a way that
required minimal changes to the previous flow of the text. Then we could have
something that was Wysiwyg, interactive, and produced output that looked
fairly decent.

~~~
Argorak
"Fairly decent" is a fairly low bar for a typesetting system.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ok, at least as good as TeX then, something much better than Word. I mean, we
are getting good with doing incremental computation (e.g. FRP, SAC, etc...),
why not apply these techs to the problem of typesetting.

------
pestaa
Hm. The rendered patobook.pdf documentation wouldn't display in the browser;
after downloading and opening it in Acrobat Reader, it said some embedded font
couldn't be loaded completely, I guess all monospace formatted text was lost:
see screenshot at
[http://i.imgur.com/MhkPqRR.png](http://i.imgur.com/MhkPqRR.png)

I'm very glad to see this project happen but this wasn't a good first
impression.

~~~
cdash
Seemed to work fine for me in Chrome on Windows.

------
oftenwrong
Is "line" in this pronounced as in "gasoline" (lin) or "waistline" (laɪn) or
"adrenaline" (lɪn)?

edit: Like gasoline. "Its name is to be pronounced like Pa-toe-leen, and it is
the frenchifcation of the translation in portuguese of a joke in english"

~~~
copperx
I'm pretty sure the pronunciation comes from Count Duckula's translation to
Spanish.

Listen to the first 5 seconds of this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AR58I40_Os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AR58I40_Os)

That's how you pronounce it.

------
cevn
I was ready to like this, but I ran into a lot of problems installing
camlimages on os x. Anyone else? I'll keep working on it later.

------
funkaster
Interesting approach. Even though as for a replacement for TeX, I always
expected Lout[1] to gain popularity. I haven't used it in years, but I
remember being really easy to learn and way lighter than TeX.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29)

------
ajarmst
Folks, stop trying to solve problems that have already been solved. Especially
if it was Don Knuth who solved it. When that guy solves something, it _stays_
solved.

In this case, you're up against something Don Knuth solved and then Leslie
Lamport made more useable. You really want to compete with those two?

~~~
sdp
It's a mistake to think we can't improve on something because someone smart
built it. In my academic community, everyone fights with LaTeX and I can only
say with confidence that one person I know has mastered it. Everyone else just
hacks at their document until it's close enough.

~~~
bithive123
That could also describe the process by which the majority of computer code is
written when you consider everything that involves coding these days. The
situation is not likely to change with new tools.

------
pmeunier
Thanks for your interest in our project, that hasn't released any version 0.1
in three years, and yet manages to concentrate a lot of (maybe necessary) love
and hate.

First, about the technical points:

\- Ocaml has been backward compatible for the last 20 years, which is why we
rely on it for backward/forward compatibility. After some time, we obviously
hope to release a forward compatible version of Patoline. As a side note, I've
got several papers written in LaTeX on my hard drive, that don't compile
anymore after only eight years.

I imagine that debugging and improving packages written in TeX is hard enough
that authors who manage to do it do not bother about compatibility. With the
exception, of course of those "who know TeX and LaTeX pretty well" (at least
until the day they write their first package, like I did shortly before
beginning Patoline).

Moreover, there is something called "a type system" that OCaml uses, that
makes your code more likely that any other non-functional language to remain
stable through time. I know there are people who do not acknowledge the
existence of this, and confuse it with older systems such as type checking in
C, or who believe functional programming is a parenthesis writing competition.
I would like not to use the kind of authority arguments I've seen in this page
to convince you. Trying ocaml or haskell is a good way, but you need to be
willing to be convinced, which is usually not the case in this kind of
discussions. At least it makes sure that the program cannot run into an
"undefined behavior" without the author being aware of it, something that my
own daily experience with programs such as svg2tex does not do.

\- In our first project meeting about Patoline, it was decided to _not_ choose
a definitive language. This is probably the only design choice. Of course
there is a default one (intended to be forward compatible, if you are still
following), but you can change it. Like markdown? Write a compiler to Ocaml,
it should not take more than a couple of hours, and you won't have to rewrite
20000 lines of code to handle the crappy font formats that Microsoft, Apple
and Adobe have designed for you, nor 3000 to output reasonably portable PDF
documents that most printers can print (maybe this is an explanation of the
size).

\- Knowing quads, struts, \expandafter and \futurelet is cool knowledge. Did
you also known that TeX uses its own fixed-point algebra? While these are
certainly "inventions of a genius", using 21st century numerical methods to
adjust spaces is efficient use of science and technology, and that's what we
do. By the way, have you heard of IEEE-754? It doesn't begin with a slash,
I've seen it used at Caltech, probably Stanford knows about it too.

Now about other points:

\- What is "feature-completeness"? I know "Turing-completeness", which is the
ability to simulate any Turing machine. On the operating systems we have
today, "Turing^OS-completeness" (the ability to simulate any Turing machine
with the OS as an oracle) is probably a great feature too. This is something
Patoline has, that TeX doesn't. Querying online bibliographic databases in
Patoline is a matter of writing a few lines of OCaml. In TeX, it means writing
pascal code, for a variant of pascal that can talk to the OS (web2c probably
can, I'm sure, although it was not written by a genius).

\- We also seek to provide a development platform for new typesetting
algorithm. While Knuth may be regarded as "the man who invented dynamic
programming", he was ten years old when Bellman discovered it. Today, we have
other methods, such as approximation algorithms. We could even imagine
learning good typographic choice using methods from machine learning. There is
space for innovation on this planet, and although I use emacs and vim, and
even pdflatex on a daily basis, I do not consider them a full stop to
software.

~~~
Argorak
While this is half an answer to my post, I am incredibly put off by the tone
and will not take a second look at your project.

Yes, I know what a modern type system is and what merits it has. I also know
that TeX has it's own fixed point math. But I am not convinced by your product
either and this is certainly not helping. I do also now know that one of the
authors is incredibly snobbish about his product, which I have a strong
aversion against. And this is where I'll stop.

~~~
pmeunier
You're right, but then if your point was to start a discussion, maybe the best
way to do it was not to start looking down at our project and assume that we
are total ignorants who worked five years on something without any idea of
what we were doing or what others did before.

Your first comments were really offensive, but I recognize that the tone of my
post also reflected the 95% of negativity in the comments I've heard since we
started it, the vast majority of them without even looking at what we're
trying to do (we've even had comments like "stop using your favorite text
editor / version control system / operating system and use mine instead"!).

What was your point in trying to destroy an embryo project? Didn't you expect
such a reaction from their parents?

~~~
Argorak
I think I see where this went of track and I think this is a grave
misunderstanding.

"The biggest hurdle in all those systems is understanding what typesetting
actually is"

Read it as:

"The biggest hurdle in all those systems (for the user) is understanding what
typesetting actually is"

Many programmers approach TeX (and patoline?) as programming environments like
programming languages. They are not, even if they allow to build new
components (maybe using scripts). I wanted to illustrate the challenges from
that perspective.

I did not want to fundamentally criticize your ability to tackle those
problems or imply that patoline is not fitting to those problems. My biggest
problem was that the About page gave me no idea about your system as a
typesetting system, only as a programming environment and some of that gives
me a bit of a headache. This is by the way shared with many other projects, my
pet peeve is a programming language that mentions it's own name only once on
the About page and Haskell thrice ;). Be more self-centric! What is patoline,
not compared to TeX?

If you read anything else out of that - I am sorry for phrasing that wrong.

Still, as a maintainer of a software that is often criticized in similar
fashions (we build a web framework in Ruby that is not Rails), I would
recommend to take the criticism as a less emotional matter. Software is rarely
our actual baby and it often helps more to just discuss the actual points of
the criticism or check whether there is a misunderstanding (this, in this
instance, also applies to me).

As a final word: Sorry for what came out of that. I understand your
frustration and that you needed to write it off your chest. My reaction was a
bit knee-jerk as well.

~~~
pmeunier
Oooooh! Ok, my mistake, sorry for the misunderstanding too.

I agree that we should reformulate the website, that was written two years ago
now. I'll try to do something, given all the comments on this discussion,
including yours and others'.

~~~
Argorak
Great! Feel free to ping me on twitter, same username, when you have
something. I'd really like to see it.

Happy that this is settled, too.

------
deskamess
I am still not clear what the output format is - is it a set of html pages
that can be hosted on a server? A compiler produces a binary and the binary
generates document(s)?

I am looking for an authoring tool where I can create the text of a tutorial
but have Bret Victor like sections of interactiveness that illustrate the
details of the text. The end format would be a set of web pages. I could code
it all up with html+javascript+backend but I am wondering if there is an
existing tool to do all this (some sort of task specific editor).

~~~
fmoralesc
There's R Markdown:
[http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_shiny.html](http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_shiny.html)

(Found about this today because someone requested R Markdown support in [vim-
pandoc]([https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc/](https://github.com/vim-
pandoc/vim-pandoc/)), which I manage. The result was [vim-
rmarkdown]([https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-
rmarkdown/)](https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-rmarkdown/\)))

------
mangecoeur
It's about time someone gave this a bash - though to some extent this covers
the same ground a Pandoc.

However, some of the technological choices seem... unwise if the aim is a
lively community project. Version control for instance - whatever technical
advantages Darcs may have are heavily outweighed by it's much smaller user
base (having to learn a new VCS just to contribute to a project is a massive
pain!)

------
jeffreyrogers
What are the advantages of this over TeX/LaTeX? I already know LaTeX quite
well as will most people who are looking for a typesetting system.

~~~
a-nikolaev
It seems, Patoline's syntax resembles LaTeX syntax a lot, but it lets you
embed code more easily. And you can use OCaml or some it's subset instead of
TeX's \if, \loop, etc [1], which is probably a good thing.

    
    
       \begin{genumerate}(AlphaLower, fun s -> [tT (s^". ")])
         \item First item
         \item Second item
       \end{genumerate}
    

Which produces:

    
    
       a. First item
       b. Second item
    

[1]
[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Plain_TeX#Conditionals](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Plain_TeX#Conditionals)

------
adrusi
I find it ironic that a website for a typesetting tool requires me to zoom in
to be able to comfortably read it.

It looks like it could be an improvement over TeX. I like that modularity is a
focus, because that's where TeX really suffers. Hopefully the typographical
elements will actually be composable and extendable rather than having the
loose facade of such functionality found in TeX.

------
mikevm
> The new typesetting algorithms of Patoline places your figures at an optimal
> position decided by the author, not by the system. It can optimize your
> document in several ways, including reducing its size to fit the standards
> of a conference paper.

I guess this means you could use this to force a résumé to fit on one page!

------
mintone
I haven't any input on the actual product - it's not something I have a need
for but spell check the site! The about page is full of mistakes.

> ...powerful tools that have been developped to process languages...

I assume the author is French from the mistakes, just run it through an
english spellcheck platform.

------
robinhoodexe
Interesting, it'd be nice if it was available on homebrew and not just
macports though.

------
apepe
It'd be nice to see this working in Authorea as well:
[https://www.authorea.com/](https://www.authorea.com/) Have you had any luck
rendering Patoline to HTML5? Via Pandoc?

------
Tepix
What's wrong with their web page? The font they picked looks terrible on both
Chrome and Firefox, even when zoomed.

~~~
theon144
It's Alegreya, and I find it quite beautiful.

Quoting Google fonts[0]: 'Alegreya was chosen as one of 53 "Fonts of the
Decade" at the ATypI Letter2 competition in September 2011, and one of the top
14 text type systems. It was also selected in the 2nd Bienal Iberoamericana de
Diseño, competition held in Madrid in 2010."'

Maybe your font rendering is broken somehow?

[0]:
[http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Alegreya](http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Alegreya)

------
amirmc
It's great to see this here. I meant to try out patoline over a year ago but
it wasn't quite ready. This prompts me to take another look. I do remember the
devs being very approachable and helpful (which is big plus for me).

I'd encourage the devs to put this in OPAM proper though. Having to add a
remote seems like unnecessary friction. Having said that, it's not clear from
the site what the current release is.

