51 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
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@def hascode=false
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<!--
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reviewed: 20/12/19
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-->
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# FAQ - Meta
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## Why bother with yet another SSG?
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There is a [multitude of static site generators](https://www.staticgen.com/) out there... is this one worth your time?
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I didn't start working on Franklin hoping to "beat" mature and sophisticated generators like Hugo or Jekyll.
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Rather, I had been using Jacob Mattingley's much simpler [Jemdoc](http://jemdoc.jaboc.net/using.html) package in Python with Wonseok Shin's [neat extension](https://github.com/wsshin/jemdoc_mathjax) for MathJax support.
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I liked that Jemdoc+Mathjax was simple to use and didn't require a lot of web-dev skills to get going.
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That's how I got the idea of doing something similar in Julia, hopefully improving on the few things I didn't like such as the lack of support for live-rendering preview or the speed of page generation.
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That being said, if you just want a blogging generator mostly for text and pictures, then Franklin may not be the tool for you.
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If you want to host a technical blog with maths, code blocks, and would like some easy and reproducible control over elements, then Franklin could help you (feel free to [open an issue](https://github.com/tlienart/Franklin.jl/issues/new) to see if Franklin is right for you).
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### Why not Pandoc?
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[Pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) is a very different beast.
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Franklin's aim was never to provide a full-fledged LaTeX to HTML conversion (which Pandoc does).
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Rather, Franklin supports standard markdown **and** the definition of commands following a LaTeX-like syntax.
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These commands can make the use of repeated elements in your website significantly easier to use and maintain.
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Further, Pandoc does not deal with the generation of a full website with things like live-previews, code evaluation etc.
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### Why write a markdown parser?
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I suspect many computer scientists or similar types will agree that _parsing_ is an interesting topic.
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Franklin provided an incentive to think hard about how to parse extended markdown efficiently and while I'd definitely not dare to say that the parser is very good, it does a decent job and I learned a lot coding it.
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In particular, processing LaTeX-like commands which can be re-defined and should be resolved recursively, proved pretty interesting (and sometimes a bit tricky).
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Initially Franklin was heavily reliant upon the Julia `Markdown` package (part of the `stdlib`) which can convert markdown to HTML but, over time, this changed as Franklin gained the capacity to parse a broader set of Markdown as well as extensions.
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### Did you know?
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Franklin was initially named "_JuDoc_" which happened to be a [fairly obscure saint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judoc) (I definitely did not know that before registering the package). The name was meant to be close to *Jemdoc* from which the initial inspiration for this package comes and, of course, to hint at the fact that it was in Julia.
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After being kindly told that the name was awkward, I received great suggestion and we ended up renaming the package Franklin to honour
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@@tlist
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- [Rosalind Franklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin), an English chemist who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA, and
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- [Benjamin Franklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin), an american polymath and one of the Founding Fathers.
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@@
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There's also happens to be a turtle and a US president with that name but that's mostly fortuitous.
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