101–110 of 349 posts
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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 awful for the blind, most PDFs are very painful to extract text from.
PDFs are awful.
May I share a related vignette? I have a kid in middle school, and he has a tablet. These things are often pushed as "educational". Pop quiz: you walk by, and you need to determine, within a couple of seconds, if what he's doing is actually educational. Here's what you see: lots of graphics, whizzing around the screen -or- black alphanumeric characters against a white background Now, you don't actually know , but gen…
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.
a_0+1/(a_1+1/(a_2+1/(⋱+(1/a_n ) )))
Past that into an editor that accepts the spec, and you'll get something like http://imgur.com/a/7hBwv
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!
Which reminds me of my "biggest" crux these days: what should I replace Evernote with? Looking for a text-based solution, possibly open source, possibly encrypted, and possibly with sync.
Or something like DevonThink.
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.
that severely limits its adoption with people that spend all their days defending the idea of 'attack surface'. so google draw uses svg, and exports svg, but won't import svg. github won't inline svgs in md, etc
i don't personally like the svg design, its got a lot of weird corners and has the usual screwy relationship with the DOM. but having a fully neutral vector format would be such a massive win, by all means svgs if you can get it more widely adopted...maybe some sort of sanitized/sandboxed svg subset.
postscript should have been that format, but they were so focussed on driving rasterization that they made any kind of other interpretation (i.e. editing) impossible.
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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.
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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.
Subscript and superscript are the bigger problem than fractions, also larger-than-one-line parentheses. Fractions can be aped in the ugly approach of dashes just like how Markdown underlines headers.
The process took about a year. My own estimate is that we lost about 2-3 months to tool-related problems, without any benefit whatsoever. I have never in my 20 year career understood the point of word-processing tools, and never will.
And those tools make money. That is wrong.
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why would someone with 40+ years of math experience have such a hard time learning a new notation?
Because knowledge about maths is independent of computer and programming literacy.
if we use a conservative definition of "computer and programming literacy", then it's not a requisite for either.
markup languages are not programming languages. most people have some familiarity with some markup language.