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We believe the future of online conversation is plain text, too. www.hellolyra.com
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We believe the future of online conversation is plain text, too. www.hellolyra.com
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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…
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
This. 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…
Microsoft Office has two internal math formats, one of them is Ecma Math[0], the other the other is the "Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics"[1], it is a Unicode standard and uses only Unicode standard characters. It has the unfortunate property of being hard to type on its own (the integral character isn't on most people's keyboards), but it is pretty easy to read as just plain text. If you copy an equation out of Word you'll get something like this: ∫(x^2/2)
[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2006/10/06/mathml-a...
[1] http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath-v3.pdf
Disclaimer: I work @Microsoft improving on some math features, and we are the main implementors of the spec. Which makes me sad, since it is an open spec and it is really powerful!
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.
Here is an example of using the IPython kernel to evaluate inline Python code within an OrgMode document.[1][2]
More information on how to create multi-language notebooks with OrgMode Babel here[3]
[0] http://minimaxir.com/2017/06/r-notebooks/
[1] http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu/blog/2017/01/29/ob-ipython...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You almost certainly can open PowerPoint 97 files today. Probably RealMedia too. Even better, going forward, pptx (and docx, etc.) are open standards.
"Open" yet there fails to be a compatible office suite that can render pptx and docx in the same way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The specification is inadequate to imitate Office" is a different claim from "it only exists as a proprietary, closed format."
From what I've heard, the MS Office applications do not even entirely comply with the published specification. So OOXML is still not a definition of the format with which PowerPoint stores its files.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
UTF-8, Unicode.
What if you are using another encoding that already works for you? Same as real life alphabets and such?
Let the fractured world of code pages rest in peace. Unicode may not be perfect, but it sure beats the alternatives.