41–50 of 349 posts
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 think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert into other formats and deliciously human readable are the way to go. 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.…
Github is widely used too, and being used in code, it's likely that it will appear in more places than just online wikis.
What important problem in this domain does the author think plain text uniquely solves? I'd say that the arguments aren't specific to education, and that they're also pretty weak. Remember that one of the major breakthroughs of the World Wide Web was that HTML meant documents were no longer plaintext.
- Notepad
- Microsoft Word
- Twiki
- Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML
- JIRA
- Raw HTML
- Markdown (several flavors)
With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.
I've been getting so tired of having to re-do stuff on different platforms that more of my docs are starting as Plaintext and then written in pseudocode markup for areas that I know will change on every platform (e.g. generating a table of contents, image tags, etc).
Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, except when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.
The docs of mine that seem most resilient to platform shifts (other than plaintext) are the ones that are written in or compiled to longstanding formats like LaTeX or HTML.
So perhaps my takeaway is, write in something readable that compiles to something widely available. That will provide the least headache.
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.
They are OK in theory, for the reasons you state.
The problem is the gratuitous use of PDF which we have all experienced - here's a common (pathological) example:
Document author starts with plain text - no special formatting or fonts, no images, etc. Somehow their toolchain converts that into a PDF file that contains No text, but rather an image of text.
The result is a big, bloated, unnecessary use of PDF that cannot even be parsed or used with anything but a graphical PDF viewer since the text is now gone - there is nothing but a picture. Of text.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. 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 has a serious adoption problem compared to MarkDown.
The post correctly notes that R Markdown files are plain text, but the benefits of such (version control) are not discussed by the OP.