(I'm addressing the Scribble part of the question. I'm not familiar
with Pollen.)
I understand the question about vendor lock-in. That's neither the
intent nor the effect, and people here will happily help you go to other
formats.
You can already generate HTML, LaTeX (PDF), and Markdown from Scribble.
The Scribble framework is also open, so that you can add code to
generate other formats.
Another way to get to lots of different formats from Scribble would be
to make Scribble generate more-plain HTML5 (i.e., less tag-heavy than in
its normal HTML output, throwing away a lot of the info), and then use
that as a source format for other converters.
Converting from plain HTML5 is also a good way to get into the popular
eBook formats. You'll need to add a little more info in addition to the
HTML5.
Similar to HTML5 as a lingua franca, there's also DocBook, for which you
could also write a converter using Scribble's open framework. It's a
more heavyweight and bureaucratic approach than HTML5, but your
off-the-shelf converters might be able to do more work for you for some
target formats. I would try HTML5 first.
In the worst case, if you ever got into a bind, the Scribble is usually
just a human-readable text file (in what might as well be a declarative
markup format), so you could convert it easily with a text editor to
some other markup source format. Or paste the text into Microsoft
Office or some other vendor lock-in-ish platform, and go from there.
Finally, Racket doesn't require you to use Scribble. Scribble is there
if you want it, but Racket as a general-purpose language is happy if you
want to make your source format instead be HTML5, Markdown, some simple
sexp format, or something else, and you can write Racket programs to
work with those formats.
(BTW, I looked at Pandoc a while ago, and it didn't really appear great
for making high-quality e-book reader formats (which would be the main
target, format other than HTML5 and PDF). Seemed like generated HTML5
was a better and simpler fit than Pandoc, for current e-book formats,
and let you maintain more control over the quality of the conversion.
For any really old e-book formats you wanted to support for some reason,
I'd just use off-the-shelf converters from HTML5, since the old formats
are often awful to generate (e.g., PalmDoc contortions to fit a book or
database on an original Pilot), and further work on those formats is
probably not worthwhile. But generating HTML5-based modern formats
yourself from Scribble is reasonable.)
Neil V.
Gour wrote on 04/21/2015 04:53 AM:
Hello,
after becoming interested to learn Racket to be used as general-purpose
language, I'm considering to use Scribble/Polen for my writing/web projects.
However, I'm a bit concerned not finding any converted which could be used to
conver markup from/to Scribble which means that using it provides some kind
of (vendor) lock-in?
Is it true there are no converters available (there is none for Pandoc)?
Sincerely,
Gour
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