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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.
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.
Are you stating that there are people that like pdfs?
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax.
They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail a group of non-technical mathies.
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
Unicode has some symbols. But there is limited ability to arrange them freely. e.g: representing a continued fraction in plain text seems a very futile exercise.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
False. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
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.
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…
I believe that MediaWiki, AsciiDoc or LaTeX are particularily well-suited for this purpose.
MediaWiki is already widely known and widely used for knowledge accumulation, namely, in Wikipedia. The downside is, of course, that this wiki language has quite some limitations.
AsciiDoc is a well-designed language with a stable definition for years. (Compare this to Markdown: Are you using the original Markdown? Or a fork of some fork of Markdown?) Also, AsciiDoc can be converted to beautiful HTML as well as beautiful PDF. Also, the clean definition of AsciiDoc means you have no trouble with nesting. For example, in a table cell you can put everything: enumerations, code listings, and so on. You can even put a new table within a table cell if you need to.
LaTeX is the de-facto standard in mathematics and parts of computer science, and has proven to be a stable standard, too. For example, arXiv doesn't accept your generated PDF as black-box, they want your LaTeX source and generate the PDF themselves. (That way, they can, for example, automatically produce PDFs with hyperlinks from documents which originally had no hyperlinks.) The downside is, of course, that LaTeX is not as readable as a plaintext-like format.
So for any "serious" / rigorous documentation purposes, either AsciiDoc, MediaWiki or LaTeX are the way to go.