I've been keeping an eye on Racket for a few years now, and recently gave their documentation tool Scribble[1] a try, as an alternative to writing LaTeX directly. But honestly I found the experience difficult if you need some custom behavior, and falling back to Racket was very confusing as a relative newcomer to Lisp (with mostly Elisp experience). It doesn't help that their documentation, while detailed, is not very beginner friendly. So I went back to org-mode for exporting to PDF via LaTeX.
Pollen [1] is pretty neat, it's amazing what Matthew Butterick has done with it to create his books. Beautiful Racket [2] truly is beautiful and inspiring.
You're not kidding, that's probably the most beautiful book in HTML I've ever seen. The typography is gorgeous, the navigation is intuitive and easy to use, downloadable code samples, links for every paragraph with a feedback form (!), and the writing style is clear and approachable.
It's definitely on my to-read list. Thanks for sharing!
I did the exact same thing, trying for a better LaTeX. But my experience was different: I found it very easy to customize and programmatically generate content. However, I have used Racket and lisps/schemes before, so that is likely the difference. I encourage you to try programming with Racket outside of Scribble to get a better handle on it!
I gave up creating anything with scribble or pollen, not sure which one it was, when I had the nagging urge to change the font and could not figure out how to do that. Composing different parts of the document was OK, but I simply could not find anything about changing the font. I am sure, if I had asked, I would have gotten an answer, but in that moment, it killed my motivation to get into it further.
Probably Scribble, which is pretty opinionated. Pollen basically gives you tools to design your own markup and makes no assumptions about the published result.
Congrats on the release!
[1]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/