Re: [ANN] Skribilo 0.9.4 released

Pierre Neidhardt <[email protected]> Thu, 03 May 2018 10:32:17 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.lisp.guile.user,gmane.lisp.guile.sources,gmane.comp.type-setting.skribilo.user,gmane.comp.type-setting.lout
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

This must be the computer program I've been waiting for the longest time!
(Roughly 10 years...)

After too much fighting with the idyosyncracies of LaTeX, I had been
thinking of a document processing language with a similar design:
programmable with a clean separation between the input and output
drivers.  I never went down to realize the project though, so seeing it
happening now is like a dream coming true :)

(Although after further reading it seems like similar projects have been
under development since the 2000s at least).

I'll try it out soon.  In the mean time, a few questions:

1. Is there any procedural graphics capability?  Here I'm thinking TikZ,
Asymptote, etc.  TikZ turns "programming" into a much dreaded nightmare
and while Asymptote makes it a bit more approachable, it still suffers
from a language that has more ill-designed "features" than C++.

2. What about page formatting capabilities?  Can Skribilo generate, say,
a letter?

3. How is it related to other GNU projects?  Is it used anywhere?

4. Skribilo's manual is available in HTML / PDF format, but not in
Info.  Strange, is there a good reason for it?  I like Info :)

5. This seems to be in direct competition with Racket's Scribble (which
I haven't really tested either).  Is there a good reason for not merging
the two projects?  What are the differences between the two?

6. I didn't know about Lout: the project page is rather empty and the
description very scarce.  If I understand correctly, it's an alternative
to TeXlive as a PDF rendering backend.  If so, then it's a brilliant
initiative, I find TeXlive so bloated it is hardly manageable.

7. As for Lout, I had never heard of Skribilo before.  Maybe it's just
me...  But I think it would be worth reaching out for a broader
audience.  The vast majority of the academia has been stuck with LaTeX
for too long, I can hear the far cries of too many people begging for
some progress! :D

--
Pierre Neidhardt

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