This is my custom setup for Pollen publishing system. I mainly use Pollen as convenient, extensible markup language and preprocessor for generating nice looking PDF files with ConTeXt, but it can be extended to generate HTML or any other target format.
I have historically used Pandoc to generate PDF files from Markdown. However, markdown is very limited because it's primarily a HTML authoring format and it's hard to extend beyond that. I have later discovered Pollen and thought it's excellent fit, because it can be extended with custom markup. This repository is the setup I have finally settled with.
However, I'm also happy with some aspects of the Markdown notation. This is why implemented a subset of Markdown syntax in Pollen – mostly # Headings, *emphases* and **strong emphases**. I don't aim for complete Markdown compatibility though. My aim is to be able to jot notes in some note-taking app with Markdown support (such as Bear) and then copy-paste that into Pollen.
Racket and ConTeXt have to be installed on the machine.
Template uses EB Garamond and Ysabeau fonts. Adding custom fonts to ConTeXt requires some setup.
Use raco pollen render doc.pdf to render doc.poly.pm as PDF. This will generate doc.ctx (ConTeXt source file) and then tries to run ConTeXt to compile it to doc.pdf. When something goes wrong during ConTeXt compilation phase, we can head to doc.ctx to debug potential problems with ConTeXt source file.
Use raco pollen render doc.ctx to render ConTeXt source file only.
See test/test-doc.poly.pm as reference for custom syntax.
Running pollen render doc.ctx transforms Pollen markup file to X-expression and parses custom markdown syntax (see lib/markup.rkt for reference). Then, in template.ctx we run txexpr->ctx from lib/targets/ctx.rkt to convert this X-expression co TeX markup.
pollen render doc.pdf will run pollen render doc.ctx on background and then tries to compile ConTeXt source file with ConTeXt executable to PDF.
template.cxt is derived from Pandoc ConTeXt template.