Why I'm Trying Leaflet.pub

My search for a blogging platform better suited to scientific and technical writing, and the considerations that led me to Leaflet. Plus, a guest appearance by a charming cat who's frequently sighted hanging around a neighborhood bakery.

August 06, 2026

Way back in 2018 I created my first blog on medium.com when it was the trendy newcomer bloggers were talking about.

Quite disappointingly, after nearly eight years, medium.com remains lacking in support for mathematical expressions and tables¹, objects commonly employed in scientific and technical writing, prompting me to look for alternative blogging platforms.

To provide context and to be fair to Medium, many large blogging platforms such as Substack, and Ghost also lack support for both mathematical expressions and tables. An exception is WordPress which supports both, but doesn't offer a free pricing tier, thereby posing a hurdle to those who can't be certain of their future commitment to online publishing.

Asking OpenAI's ChatGPT for suggestions led me to discovering blogging platforms built on the ATmosphere: leaflet.pub, pckt.blog, Offprint, and WhiteWind.

Leaflet.pub offers a generous range of customization options such as color themes, and fonts; natively renders mathematical expressions; has plans to support tables; and even allows per-article width customization, an idea that is similar in spirit to controlling the maximum no. of characters per line for readability.

What is also interesting is the underlying architecture of platforms built on the ATmosphere.

Behind the scenes, ATmosphere apps typically allow reading from and writing to data repositories housed on Bluesky's servers².

This means that if I were to later prefer pckt.blog over Leaflet.pub, I could in principle authorize pckt.blog to access the same underlying data repository containing my leaflet.pub articles instead of struggling to migrate all my content, or having to endure the somewhat painful decision to split my content across two providers.

As such, content portability is enhanced by reducing the friction traditionally associated with changing blogging platforms.

A Brief Comparison of ATmosphere Blog Platforms

Leaflet.pub itself is open-source, developed by a small team of around three people, and is associated with an organization called the Hyperlink Academy.

In contrast, pckt.blog and Offprint appear to be largely independent projects developed by individual creators, having different emphasis.

Despite their differences, all three offer pleasant, thoughtfully designed user experiences.

However, none of these platforms appears to be backed by substantial financial resources, which raises some concerns about their long-term viability.

Medium recommends embedding mathematical expressions and tables using third-party services. In practice, however, many writers simply insert screenshots or images of equations and tables, affecting the visual presentation of their articles and making those mathematical expressions and tables difficult to edit later.

Or, reading from and writing to the ATmosphere application's own in-house data repository. And, because these applications abide by similar protocols, they can in principle read and write to each other's data repositories after obtaining the necessary authorization.

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