I’ve been looking at this just a little bit. I’m really excited that it’s moving along.
>From what I understand Quad/Quadwriter at this stage seems sort of analagous to TeX, which is kind of a low-level typesetting language that lets you plunk down individual text blocks on a page. (I have never tried learning TeX so I might be wrong about this) Then in the TeX world LaTeX is a system of macros on top of TeX that let you more easily do higher-level typesetting tasks like adding different page headers/footers on recto/verso pages, automatic page numbering in various styles, set footnotes/endnotes, generate a table of contents or keyword index, etc. Of course, those are the tasks I’m interested in eventually using Quad for. I’m hoping a Quad community will coalesce to write our own LaTeX equivalent packages. Meanwhile for starters I’d just love to read more documentation about Q-expressions and some kind of module reference. Very exciting! On Saturday, April 27, 2019 at 10:36:05 AM UTC-5, Matthew Butterick wrote: > > I've restored Quad to a state where it can be installed and demoed. Docs > are here [1] and will continue to be expanded. > > Quad is my Racket software for programmatically generating PDFs from > markup, similar to how LaTeX works. It has been slow going because > producing reasonable PDFs meant circumventing Racket's existing system for > making them and building my own. > > The focus of the demo is Quadwriter, a little word processor built on top > of Quad, which lets you type into DrRacket and produce a PDF from what you > see. > > As for cooperating with Pollen, Quadwriter takes what I'm calling a > Q-expression as input (= a subset of X-expressions). So whereas today, your > tag functions in a Pollen project might emit LaTeX code, instead they could > emit Q-expressions, and then these would be passed to Quadwriter for final > layout and PDF conversion. > > I'm sharing Quad now because I'm at the point where I want to sort out the > emerging public interface. I expect others may have good ideas, so I > welcome suggestions, no matter how outlandish. > > [1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/quad/index.html > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pollen" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pollenpub+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
