Colophon

This site is written in Pollen, a programming language for publishing web-books. Pollen is an implementation of Racket developed by the typographer Matthew Butterick as a way of being able to call a full programming language from within a document.

Previously, this site was made using Markdown files converted to HTML with Pandoc, which is an excellent document conversion tool. But in Pollen I found something more in line with my thinking about documents as programs, that was cleaner than html to write in, and had better extensibility than Markdown. Plus I was looking for an excuse to tinker on something.

• Font: The body text and most titles are IBM Plex Mono with IBM Plex Sans Condensed for some page titles.
• CSS: I originally riffed from the standard pandoc html and borrowed liberally from Edwin Wenink’s tilde.club website. But over time I’ve also drawn from the Tufte format, Matthew Butterick’s typographic advice in Practical Typography, and a few other sites that I’ve now forgotten.
• Syntax highlighing: Code chunks are coloured using Pygments in combination with the Pygments function in the Unstable Pollen module. I’m using the ‘Tango’ colourscheme.
• Code: The Pollen markup code for this site can be found on my Github.