What is Lollipop?

Lollipop is a macro package written by Victor Eijkhout; it was used in the production of his book "TeX by Topic" (see (La)TeX Tutorials). The manual says of it:

Lollipop is 'TeX made easy'. Lollipop is a macro package that functions as a toolbox for writing TeX macros. It was my intention to make macro writing so easy that implementing a fully new layout in TeX would become a matter of less than an hour for an average document, and that it would be a task that could be accomplished by someone with only a very basic training in TeX programming.

Lollipop is an attempt to make structured text formatting available for environments where previously only WYSIWYG packages could be used because adapting the layout is so much more easy with them than with traditional TeX macro packages.

The manual goes on to talk of ambitions to "capture some of the LaTeX market share"; it's a very witty package, but little sign of it taking over from LaTeX is detectable... An article about Lollipop appeared in TUGboat 13(3).

Lollipop distribution
nonfree/macros/lollipop (zip, browse)

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=lollipop