Pollen: the book is a program

A book-publishing system written in Racket. Unstable. Incomplete. Et cetera. It’s becoming more civilized. But this is the actual software I use to publish & maintain my web-based book Butterick’s Practical Typography.

If you think documents should be programmable, you’ll love it.
If not, you can move along.

Pollen gives you access to a full programming language (Racket) with a text-based syntax that makes it easy to embed code within your documents.

• Quick tour
• Pollen as a text preprocessor (for CSS, etc.)
• Pollen for Markdown authoring
• Pollen for XML-style authoring
• Full docs

Using Racket 6.0+, install from the command line:

raco pkg install pollen

And update like so:

raco pkg update --update-deps pollen

Email discussion list for questions, tips, suggestions: pollenpub@googlegroups.com