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I just read something about "Lollipop" in an Stackexchange advertisement on this web page.

What is so different about it compared to other macros? What does it do so easily and what can it do? The readme didn't really give me much information about what it is.

Joseph Wright
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Basilius Sapientia
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1 Answers1

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victor eijkhout introduced lollipop at the 1992 tug meeting. the proceedings article resulting from his talk describes it thus:

The Lollipop format is a meta-format: it does not define user macros, but it contains the tools with which a style designer can easily implement such user macros.

victor used lollipop, along with guidance from a professional graphic designer, to produce his dissertation, an elegant presentation. lollipop also formed the basis for defining the style of the first edition of TeX by Topic (that has since been reformatted using a latex document class, but i really liked the original better).

i'm glad to see that lollipop has been resuscitated, although without victor as maintainer.

edit: since there seems to be confusion about how lollipop fits into the tex zoo, here's how i understand it.

lollipop is a tool that allows one to create a style roughly equivalent to a latex document class, and then launch a "format" (a starter set of macros superimposed on the tex engine, as latex is) to compile a document using the defined style. the essential difference is that defining the style is up to the user; decisions aren't made beforehand, as they are with latex.

perhaps with time a body of predefined styles will accumulate, but for that, a critical mass of users is needed first.

barbara beeton
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