The future of education is plain text • Hacker News Board

Re: The future of education is plain text

#161

Post by pyre » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:08 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #107

rubatuga wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open" yet there fails to be a compatible office suite that can render pptx and docx in the same way.

The alternative offered is Markdown. How can you say that it's ok for Humans to revert to raw Markdown, but unacceptable to open a legacy .ppt format in an application that may not render with 100% fidelity?

No one ever said that humans need to write raw Markdown. Take a look at Typora as an example Markdown editor. Raw Markdown would be the fallback scenario, which is still readable/grok-able. docx/pptx/xlsx don't have such a fallback scenario.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#162

Post by ska » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:10 PM UTC

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.

PDF is a terminal format.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#163

Post by pyre » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #63

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 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.…

On the other hand, how does one write a standard invoice or a tax form using only plain-text / markdown? Formats with control over the layout have their place.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#164

Post by ska » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:14 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #25

krapht wrote: post #2

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…

This is mostly a social problem, not technical. It's a shame, as MS Word has at best mediocre support for typesetting mathematics.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#165

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:15 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#166

Post by gkya » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #122

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…

> With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc. And plain text is itself a nightmare to parse and do anything beyond reading it as a block.

How is it harder to parse than a PDF or a docx?

Re: The future of education is plain text

#167

Post by Animats » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

The author doesn't mean "plain text". They mean some variant of Markdown.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#168

Post by pyre » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #129

CuriouslyC wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDFs seem to render poorly on ebook readers.

Mainly because the layout code (Postscript?) in the PDF file assumes an A4 or US letter sized page. Most PDFs just cannot handle being reflowed.

> Mainly because the layout code (Postscript?) in the PDF file assumes an A4 or US letter sized page

Technically, it could be anything. The layout is specified, and everything stems from this.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#169

Post by gkya » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #127

coldtea wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using those other editors is an added benefit.

Not unless you work alone. When you work with other people, it's important to use a common format for the benefit of the group. Trying to force other people to use emacs won't win you any friends.

Org exports to anything including utf8 plain text with a nice style reminiscent of IEEE RFCs.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#170

Post by analog31 » Tue, Jun 13, 2017, 6:30 PM UTC

confounded wrote: post #154

It 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, et…

A thought occurs to me about source versus consumption formats. It would seem to me that source code should be the distribution format. That way, the recipient can choose their own preferred consumption format.

When I first heard about HTML, described in some magazine article, it was touted as a way to give people a chance to have their own unique readers. For instance, a blind person might want to have their own HTML reader, that uses the hierarchy of header tags to help them navigate the document.

Today, my impression is that HTML and its successors are treated more like a general purpose programming language intended to drive visual-specific browsers. This is why we have to create target specific web pages (e.g., mobile and desktop), rather than let each target's browser render generic pages.