111–120 of 349 posts
I recently wrote a book using Libreoffice and Microsoft Word, because the publisher demanded it. 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.
When I think of lecture notes I think of two uses:
1. An informal reference/mnemonic for the lecturer. This use suggests a format that suits the particular lecturer (which may not necessarily be text, or even a digital format).
2. Potential answers to exam questions for situations where there are too few instructors (i.e., lecturer plus TAs) chasing too many students over too short a time for students to practice critical thinking.
Are there other uses? If not, I can imagine standardizing notes across schools could be a detriment by streamlining "plugging-and-chugging".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The "Unicode Nearly Plain-Text Encoding of Mathematics" standard[0] can do this just fine. :) 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! [0] ht…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
Yeah, go teach a 60-year-old math teacher to use TeX.
Plaintext OrgMode notebooks exhibit every benefit listed in Minimaxir's [0] post, and have the additional advantage of powerful editor integration beyond R code. 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://kit…
For exchange and processing data (data != information), UTF-8 text with contextual formatting like Markdown, CSV, etc is nice as it is generally tool agnostic.
But for conveying information (information != data), plaintext sucks. That's why Markdown is a copout -- the formatting still matters... and humans don't perceive markup coding as well as the rendered result. Humans do better with visual queues when interpreting written data. Formatting, typesets, bullets, tables, graphs, etc all help use process and contextualize data.
If being able to reference information or data over time, where time > 10 years, you need to think about what you're doing. (Archivists do this professionally.) PDF is the quick path to address this for format-sensitive applications, as big & important institutions like the US Courts use PDF for their documents -- it isn't going anywhere. Big datasets are more complex to deal with... you have to decide whether the raw data should be preserved vs. the processed/analyzed data, etc.
There’s no such thing as “plain text”. Is this UTF-8, latin-1, 7 bits ASCII…?
It's UTF-8.
I sent someone an important text (7-bit ASCII) file once. Much later, I found that they had tried to read it using NotePad. They had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to format it into something they could read. Had they opened it in WordPad, Word, a web browser, or practically anything else it would not have been a problem, but by default text files are opened with NotePad.
Please don't get me started on tabs vs spaces.
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
Then, mathematical notation should be simplified.
Handbook for Spoken Mathematics (1983) http://web.efzg.hr/dok/MAT/vkojic/Larrys_speakeasy.pdf
MathPlayer https://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathplayer/
TalkMaths http://talkmaths.sourceforge.net/
Language and Mathematics: Bridging between Natural Language and Mathematical Language in Solving Problems in Mathematics http://file.scirp.org/pdf/CE20100300008_45591409.pdf
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
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…
Or the student could be a visual learner.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/13/teachers-n...