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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#171

Post by gkya »

canes123456 wrote: post #65
rsync wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

A PDF without text still kind of works. It not accessible which is a big problem. However, this happens when there is a mistake somewhere in the chain. This is all too common, but what is the correct way to handle tables, diagrams, formulas, images, graphs, links in plain text. There is no right way to do these things in plain text. You will eventually need html or pdf for education.

Also: PDFs have pages and thus page numbers, which are an important tool. When working with long texts you need reference points to share your state.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#172

Post by a3n »

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…

> Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, except when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.

I just did essentially the same, in reStructuredText.

The battle is so lost that I don't even bother fighting it, but there are many nice things about reST: you have to explicitly escape html to get it passed through as html (feature/bug), tables are easy, especially the list tables, I'm used to it (feature? bug?), ...

Re: The future of education is plain text

#173

Post by gkya »

analog31 wrote: post #170
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 HTM…

That's nice and all but in a classroom you want to be able to say "open page n". Anything else causes terrible confusion.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#174

Post by a3n »

bluetwo wrote: post #51

A long text explaination of how a piston engine works or a short explanation and an animated GIF. Which is better? I would say the second one is more effective.

Depending on who's doing the advocating, plain text doesn't inhibit images or any other media, as any site with media written in markdown or reStructuredText shows. Lots of GitHub READMEs are written in Markdown and include images, for example.

There are a number of image formats that are commonly supported, as well as video and audio. Once you've decided to go beyond face to face speech in the same language, you have to make compromises. Just try to minimize those, and try to stay within conflicts that have compromises, like line endings.

I think starting from "authorship in plaintext," along with sharing plaintext files, would move things pretty far forward. (I guess there's some irony in there.)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#175

Post by FabHK »

One advantage of plain text formats that I haven't seen mentioned is that they're easily and meaningfully diff-able.

You can run two versions of a markdown file or a LaTeX source file through a diff, and see what's been changed. Try that with a PDF or Word file or what have you.

As I like to keep my files in version control, I use plain text formats as much as possible.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#176

Post by emodendroket »

pyre wrote: post #161
Spooky23 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are countless software packages that can edit and display Office XML files besides just the Office package, so I'd think the fallback scenario is using one of those.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#177

Post by dwringer »

doublerebel wrote: post #67

Plain text: so that no one can own the presentation method. Plain text: so that no one can own the distribution method. Plain text: so that no one can own the creation method. Plain text: so normal people can recover data even when partially corrupted. Plain text: so you aren't forced to see jarring ads. Plain text: so that there are no tracking pixels. Plain text: because connecting information with hyperlinks doesn…

The thing about jarring ads is a great point. I have lynx installed for those times when I've been jarred by one too many. It can be refreshing to navigate the web in a console window.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#178

Post by badminton1 »

com2kid wrote: post #103
badminton1 wrote: post #7

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…

PDF and OOXML are also open specifications.

Try to implement them though, you will run into a lot of issues.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#179

Post by gkya »

Plain text would've been THE usual way to go for most things (1), but it's so hidden in major OSs, even in Linux distros. Many use Word or Wordpad mostly as a plain text editor becausr they don't know the difference between plain text and a word document. Also, there is thpage metaphor in those programswhich people like, because we think of text in pages. This is not that hard to emulate in plain text but not that straightforward too. People often share documents so pages and paragraphs must be equal for all (paragraph numbering might be a solution). We have the tooling fir generating convenient formats for consumption likr PS and PDF, but default tooling for plain text and the visibility thereof is what's needed.

(1) When youcompose text you want to compose first style later. Wysiwyg mixes the two and you end up with crappy spelling and half arsed formatting most thetime.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#180

Post by a3n »

vesak wrote: post #109

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.

> I have never in my 20 year career understood the point of word-processing tools, and never will.

... wait for it ...

> And those tools make money.

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