Interestingly, the author of Pollen attempted to write it in Pollen first, then switched to Racket.

> “I wrote the initial version of Pollen in Python. I devised a simplified markup-notation language for the source files. This language was compiled into XML-ish data structures using ply (Python lex/yacc). These structures were parsed into trees using LXML. The trees were combined with templates made in Chameleon. These templates were rendered and previewed with the Bottle web server.

> “Did it work? Sort of. Source code went in; web pages came out. But it was also complicated and fragile. Moreover, though the automation was there, there wasn’t yet enough abstraction at the source layer. I started thinking about how I could add a source preprocessor.”

[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/Backstory.html#%28part._...

I've created https://github.com/gpoore/codebraid for running Python in Pandoc Markdown. It's written in Python and focused on executing Python code, though it also supports Julia, R, Rust, Bash, and JavaScript. It operates on the Pandoc AST, so there are no Markdown preprocessor issues and there's no custom Markdown syntax.

I'm working pretty much exactly on that. It's not at all fit for consumption yet though. This is a file I'm using for testing: https://gitlab.com/mbarkhau/litprog/blob/master/lit_v3/11_ov...

There's bookdown in R which is great.

https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/

Perhaps pweave, which is like knitr for Python.

http://mpastell.com/pweave/

If you want to publish on the web, why not give Pollen a try (I'm assuming you haven't)? It isn't really a static generator, but the end result is similar.

It's a pretty neat system and worth learning before you head off to invent your own wheel.

I tried pollen, but I just don't have room for another language in my head I'm only going to use for one purpose, and I felt the cool features were around the combination of text and code, not the racket/lisp part.

Not a fan of DSL's? I err on the other side of that coin and tend to produce them even when it may be overkill.

Pointers: paged.js for paged-media polyfills. Sphinx (you can customize the layout). Static page generators.

In general, you'll want javascript-assisted solutions working in the browser, and then some pre-processing in Python, depending on your needs.