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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#61

Post by gizmo385 »

catshirt wrote: post #54
Pxtl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, go teach a 60-year-old math teacher to use TeX.

why would someone with 40+ years of math experience have such a hard time learning a new notation?

I don't think their assertion is that someone with 40+ years of math experience would have difficulty learning new notation, it's that LaTeX is composed of a lot more than straightfoward notation. LaTeX can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. While it's basic math notation is quite fantastic, it's the basic document formatting that I think would give most people trouble when learning.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#62

Post by mrec »

azag0 wrote: post #45
rnprince wrote: post #35

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.

You could replace "plain text" in the article with "non-binary", and it would probably make more scence. Markdown is also not plain text in the most strict sense. Or HTML is plain text in a vague sense. In the end, what really matters is how easy it is to build parsers and tools for a format. Being non-binary is a huge plus. I think that was the point of the article, and I agree with that.

I don't think anyone would claim that HTML was easy to parse, would they? It took decades for the HTML5 consensus to emerge.

I like text-based formats, but I'm not convinced that "Being non-binary is a huge plus" for parsing. With binary formats you can assume that documents are generated by a tool, which is at least trying to be compliant with a spec, so barfing on noncompliance is more acceptable. With text you have to be prepared to cope with any kind of rat dance imaginable.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#63

Post by gumby »

pyre wrote: post #19
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.

PDFs presume that the writer has "control" rather than the reader. Actually I probably shouldn't put quotes around "control" -- formatting is rigidly constrained, on purpose.

In addition PDF adapts, by design, a model of paper to the web. It's a "horseless carriage" file format.

Font size, page width, cut/paste and presentation in general should be the reader's choice, not the writer's. The Web manages this, sort of.

The OP is right on in this regard. Even the TeXs of this world, while better than the binary formats, have upgrade complexity.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#65

Post by canes123456 »

rsync wrote: post #47
pyre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"PDFs are still ok though." 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, unne…

A PDF without text still kind of works. It not accessible which is a big problem. However, this happens when there is a mistake somewhere in the chain. This is all too common, but what is the correct way to handle tables, diagrams, formulas, images, graphs, links in plain text. There is no right way to do these things in plain text. You will eventually need html or pdf for education.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#66

Post by JBorrow »

I must say that I agree - to a certain extent. They (lecture notes) actually already are (at least in HE Physics education) as everything is written in LaTeX. They are just not distributed that way. I've been working on hacking together a demo of some stuff that turns those original LaTeX documents into a little (static) website. We've had pretty positive reviews from students so far - it's searchable (which is key), considerably more screen-reader friendly, and is broken up into manageable chunks rather than being some monolithic 100+ page .pdf! (https://community.dur.ac.uk/joshua.borrow/npp_notes/)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#67

Post by doublerebel »

Plain text: so that no one can own the presentation method.

Plain text: so that no one can own the distribution method.

Plain text: so that no one can own the creation method.

Plain text: so normal people can recover data even when partially corrupted.

Plain text: so you aren't forced to see jarring ads.

Plain text: so that there are no tracking pixels.

Plain text: because connecting information with hyperlinks doesn't require all of HTML or even computers.

Plain text: because it's good enough for metadata.

My future and knowledge is in YAML-fronted markdown and YAML metadata for binaries. Let's take back our data. Look out for Optik.io.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#68

Post by krapht »

ezoe wrote: post #8
krapht wrote: post #2

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

Then, mathematical notation should be simplified.

Perhaps we should also all learn Esperanto as well, since English is such an inefficient and inconsistent means of communication.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#69

Post by tangue »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #46

Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from: - Notepad - Microsoft Word - PDF - 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 co…

Did you try org files ? Even if you're not into Emacs it might worth the try reading your needs

Re: The future of education is plain text

#70

Post by ghaff »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #52
pyre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PDFs seem to render poorly on ebook readers.

ebook readers yes. But they can work quite well on full-size tablets.

Kindles etc. are great when you're mostly reading a flow of text. For anything that benefits from design layout -- positioned graphics, sidebars, footnotes, etc. PDF on a 10" tablet is often better.

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