51 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
@def hascode=false
|
|
|
|
<!--
|
|
reviewed: 20/12/19
|
|
-->
|
|
|
|
# FAQ - Meta
|
|
|
|
## Why bother with yet another SSG?
|
|
|
|
There is a [multitude of static site generators](https://www.staticgen.com/) out there... is this one worth your time?
|
|
|
|
I didn't start working on Franklin hoping to "beat" mature and sophisticated generators like Hugo or Jekyll.
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
I liked that Jemdoc+Mathjax was simple to use and didn't require a lot of web-dev skills to get going.
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
That being said, if you just want a blogging generator mostly for text and pictures, then Franklin may not be the tool for you.
|
|
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).
|
|
|
|
### Why not Pandoc?
|
|
|
|
[Pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) is a very different beast.
|
|
Franklin's aim was never to provide a full-fledged LaTeX to HTML conversion (which Pandoc does).
|
|
Rather, Franklin supports standard markdown **and** the definition of commands following a LaTeX-like syntax.
|
|
These commands can make the use of repeated elements in your website significantly easier to use and maintain.
|
|
|
|
Further, Pandoc does not deal with the generation of a full website with things like live-previews, code evaluation etc.
|
|
|
|
### Why write a markdown parser?
|
|
|
|
I suspect many computer scientists or similar types will agree that _parsing_ is an interesting topic.
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
In particular, processing LaTeX-like commands which can be re-defined and should be resolved recursively, proved pretty interesting (and sometimes a bit tricky).
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
### Did you know?
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
After being kindly told that the name was awkward, I received great suggestion and we ended up renaming the package Franklin to honour
|
|
|
|
@@tlist
|
|
- [Rosalind Franklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin), an English chemist who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA, and
|
|
- [Benjamin Franklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin), an american polymath and one of the Founding Fathers.
|
|
@@
|
|
|
|
There's also happens to be a turtle and a US president with that name but that's mostly fortuitous.
|