Having written tons of curriculum in Markdown, I thought it was amazing! The remixing possibilities are endless and it makes all of it so much more programmable.
The future of education is plain text
151–160 of 349 posts
Re: The future of education is plain text
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Fun fact! 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 c…
Since you're here, is something like that relatively easy to use in a UWP application? I have an idea for a chemistry app and am looking for a good way to show formulas.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#153Plaintext 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…
I've found that Pandoc [1] is a wonderful converter if you want to write in a future-proof format (like markdown) but also generate nice PDFs.
[1]: http://pandoc.org/
Re: The future of education is plain text
#154It seems worth mentioning that plaintext is discussed here as the storage / source format.
That doesn't mean it has to be the distribution / consumption format.
One of the great things about something like Markdown is that it can be rendered to HTML trivially, to display video, equations, etc.
Same thing for ebooks, PDFs, whatever (thanks Pandoc!). It's also easy to translate between formats (e.g. .md, .org, .rst, etc.).
If a new format comes along that everyone wants, there's an extremely good chance that plain text can be rendered to it.
The reverse is not true.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plain text: so when Optik.io melts down immediately from an HN "hug of death" one can use high-availability services instead.
There's nothing to melt down, there is no (public) website there. I can barely get a conversation started on this topic without HN's cynicism, as you demonstrate. But as evidenced by this and other articles, as everyone is getting fed up with the current state of data, people are coming around to the idea.
As places to hustle for your project go, HN is probably one of the gentler ones. Just build first, THEN plug.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#156The future of is the solution that best meets the job. 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 resu…
Since Unicode already contains directions, smileys, combining marks, why not simply add VGA color plane and few [un]-bold/italic/big/sub/sup markers and forget about these shitty .docs, .htmls, etc? We already have a complex format, why not encapsulate at least simple formatting characters into it? These can be zero-width for rendering on systems that do not support colors. For those who want to point me at html, htm…
As a human, what do I gain from this?
Word is probably one of the most successful software products ever devised. There's a reason -- it solves a problem.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#157Plain text should be the only option for medical records. PDFs and drop-in Word documents should be frowned on.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#158I have not really found a viable plain text version to Excel that normal users can use. I have done some Excel like tasks with R, Python (pandas, and various other python sci libraries) and even SQL (postgres) but it seems its either a programming language (R, python) or a data format (csv). I have been meaning to look into what alternatives are out there.
R/Python scripts are 100% plain text. iPython notebooks are not.
I didn't say they were not. The issue is they usually do not hold the data and present the data (ie WYSIWYG). The python and R only are the formulaic part. I have not seen a format where you can toggle the data or formula and see results as well as Excel does.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Fun fact! 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 c…
Funny that it's not ∫(x²/2), though!
OK, I went and looked at the standard and it seems like they're thought about this: they allow input as either ∫(x²/2) or ∫(x^2/2) but they apparently output as ∫(x^2/2) because it's more general and editable, like if you wanted to change the exponent to something that didn't have a predefined Unicode superscript.
Re: The future of education is plain text
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact! 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 c…
Since you're here, is something like that relatively easy to use in a UWP application? I have an idea for a chemistry app and am looking for a good way to show formulas.
> Since you're here, is something like that relatively easy to use in a UWP application? I have an idea for a chemistry app and am looking for a good way to show formulas.
Unfortunately not! I am wondering if I should make requests to the Windows team internally, the Managed wrapper class they ship has the math features compiled out. :( I'm in Office, where we use an internal UWP safe C++ version of Rich Edit. We bundle it with our AppX and load it up like any other C++ DLL.