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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#11

Post by voidhorse »

As others have mentioned, once you dig into the innards and nuances of plain text representations and formats, things can get hairy. Still, I think the author is correct in that plain text formats are certainly a better base for sharing curricula, and for knowledge production in general, than something proprietary like word docs, pdfs, etc.

I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert into other formats and deliciously human readable are the way to go.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#13

Post by pyre »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #6

What about the existing "standard", PowerPoint slides and PDFs? Although most of my notes could be plain-text, any graphs or figures need pictures. ASCII art doesn't cut it.

Plain-text just needs to be the format. Checkout (e.g.) Markdown editors like Typora. The underlying format is Markdown, but it can be edited and displayed in a more visual fashion.

With the text being in plain-text, it guarantees someone the base ability to just open up (e.g.) Notepad.exe if all else fails vs. trying to open up a Powerpoint '97 presentation with embedded RealMedia files in 2017.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#15

Post by emodendroket »

pyre wrote: post #9
krapht wrote: post #2

Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.

If you distribute things in Markdown with (e.g.) MathML markup, then the reader can format that nicely for display, with PlainText / Markdown being the distribution format.

I think it really stretches the definition of "plain text" by the time you need a parser.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#16

Post by TuringTest »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #6

What about the existing "standard", PowerPoint slides and PDFs? Although most of my notes could be plain-text, any graphs or figures need pictures. ASCII art doesn't cut it.

If you're going to propose an standard for graphs and figures, please make it SVG. It's hard to find tools for editing PDF that would support text and graphics, and PowerPoint exists only as a proprietary closed format.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#19

Post by pyre »

voidhorse wrote: post #11

As others have mentioned, once you dig into the innards and nuances of plain text representations and formats, things can get hairy. Still, I think the author is correct in that plain text formats are certainly a better base for sharing curricula, and for knowledge production in general, than something proprietary like word docs, pdfs, etc. I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert…

PDFs are still ok though. There are many implementations of PDF parsers, many Open Source. It may not be as "universal" as plain-text, but it is definitely universal. At this point, I believe that all major operating systems ship with the ability to open PDFs for display.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#20

Post by emodendroket »

pyre wrote: post #13
peterburkimsher wrote: post #6

What about the existing "standard", PowerPoint slides and PDFs? Although most of my notes could be plain-text, any graphs or figures need pictures. ASCII art doesn't cut it.

Plain-text just needs to be the format. Checkout (e.g.) Markdown editors like Typora. The underlying format is Markdown, but it can be edited and displayed in a more visual fashion. With the text being in plain-text, it guarantees someone the base ability to just open up (e.g.) Notepad.exe if all else fails vs. trying to open up a Powerpoint '97 presentation with embedded RealMedia files in 2017.

You almost certainly can open PowerPoint 97 files today. Probably RealMedia too. Even better, going forward, pptx (and docx, etc.) are open standards.
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