An experiment in web programming and a really long title

Jan Niklas Böhm
1. February 2021

An experiment in web programming and a really long title

New year, new blog engine. I have opted to employ Pollen, a publishing system written in Racket. Its exporting properties are interesting to me because it enables me to also create PDFs from the same source document“The unbearable Lightness of Web Pages” takes this idea further. and gives you fine grained control over how everything looks. This is on the one hand liberating, but on the other it makes for a lot of up front work. As such, I have not yet created the option to generate PDFs, but it’s on my list.

In order to test everything out, I am showcasing the functionality I have implemented so far.

Math is rendered statically via KaTeX, so it works even if Javascript is disabled in the browser. Both inline maths, 2α=α+12^{\aleph_\alpha} = \aleph_{\alpha+1}, as well as display math work: ππx!dx=iNexp{logi}=π.\begin{aligned}\int_{-\infty}^{\pi^\pi} \ell x! \, dx &= \sum_{i\in \mathbb{N}} \exp\{\log i\}\\&=\pi\,.\end{aligned}(ayy)

1<2\sum1 < 2(1) 1<21 < 2(2)

As visible above, footnotes are styled differently by having them in the right margin. On mobile phone screens it is possible to swipe to the right. In general auxillary information can be stored there.

It’s also possible to have full figures in the margin, as well as captions thereof. By default, the caption of a figure will be shown in the margin as well.

Some polynomials.
/img/plots.png

As seen, this works reasonably well. Of course the figure is not the prettiest, but the contents here are secondary.

A figure in the margin works as well, just like a figure that stretches to the full width of both the article and margin. The drawback for that method, however, is that I haven’t yet found a good way to place a caption for it.

The floating capabilities are limited, but it does prevent overlap between elements in the margin.

So far the styling available is quite minimal but hopefully will expand in the future. Things I want to have are:

Böhm et al., 2021
A Unifying Perspective on Neighborhood Embeddings