pollen-treasure-island

pollen-treasure-island is the Project Gutenberg eBook of Treasure Island recompiled into a Racket/Pollen program. The content of the book is almost completely unmodified, but I added some improved formatting from open source fonts, navigation, and converted the images into transparent PNG files from the original JPG scans.

Purpose

The purpose of this project was simply a personal goal of mine to learn the Racket language, and more specifically in this case, Pollen. I was strongly inspired by Matthew Butterick's advocacy of Lisp and Racket, and his online books. I wanted a challenge myself to practice Pollen markup to see if I could pick it up well enough to make an attractive book. In the process I also found opportunities to learn a number of helpful tools and skills, such as:

HTML/CSS design with True Type fonts
Python for running Image Magick across all the JPGs in the image folder
Modifying an Emacs macro for encapsulating regions with Pollen tags
Github for source control

I chose Treasure Island because it had a simple consistent structure that allowed me to comfortably experiment a bit with my own markup. That, and it was fun.

Installing

Running the application is straightforward. It just requires an installation of Racket/Pollen and runs as a self-contained locally hosted website. Once you have it installed, simply run this raco command inside the directory:

raco pollen start

And then navigate to http://localhost:8080/index.ptree

The code is also structured so that the static HTML that it generates can be navigated on its own, although the HTML pages are only compiled after navigating each page one time.

TODO

There's a number of improvements I would like to add eventually:

Improved mobile device formatting
Exporting to different file types
Style and navigation improvements
Formatting customizations
- Font choices for specific markup
- Background colors

It may even be possible some day to expand this into a full blown platform making it easier to import any book (something akin to Bookiza)

Helpful Links

Here are some links that helped me along the way. Placing them here for reference.

License

All code for this project is released under the MIT license located in the LICENSE file. Any fonts used have their own license located in their metadata tags.

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