Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of education is plain text

simplystatistics.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 349 posts

Re: The future of education is plain text

#221

Post by Pxtl »

com2kid wrote: post #160
skellera wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bun…

So in other words I shouldn't hold my breath for this to appear on NuGet. That's a shame. It seems like it would play nicely with MarkDown.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#222

Post by sdenton4 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #220
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…

hmm..... having seen a bunch of demos of almost-compiling LaTeX produced by neural networks, I wonder if there's a good space for building seq2seq document format converters...

(also makes me wonder what style transfer from latex to markdown would look like; automatically convert your years-in-the-making research project into a snarky blog post!)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#223

Post by Pxtl »

paultopia wrote: post #144
Pxtl wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Ugh ugh ugh no. Storytime . A couple years ago, I was in the midst of copyedits on a book with a bunch of math in it. The copyeditors were using a different version of Word. When they sent the edits back to me, the math was gone. Completely. Not only that, but when I tried to copy-paste the math in from a prior draft, the Word file refused to save. Eventually, I had to reconstruct every one of the damn things, by han…

Well, one advantage of OneDrive is you have full history.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#224

Post by Pxtl »

fny wrote: post #190
Pxtl wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Then try AsciiMath[0]. It does a fine job of representing math as plain-text, and I find it far more sane than LaTeX for my typical use cases. LaTeX: \begin{bmatrix} 0 & 1 \\ 1 & 0 \\ \end{bmatrix} AsciiMath: [[0,1], [1,0]] [0]: http://asciimath.org/

Neat! I wonder if asciimath could be extended to an "intermediate form". Just like how there are two forms of MarkDown, there's the easy to type

    # this is a header
and the more elaborate

    this is a header
    ================
which conveys more "headerness" and is more readable than the first.

the same could be done with something like ASCIIMath, where a plain-Unicode representation could be an intermediate form between ASCII and MathML. Why? Because keyboards don't type in Unicode, but you don't want to be storing only the final output - storing an intermediate Unicode form seems best, assuming you can keep modifyign it using ASCII and then going ASCII + Unicode => Unicode.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#225

Post by mjevans »

schoen wrote: post #159
com2kid wrote: post #94

Earlier 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…

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.

I like that, except I prefer "un-necessary" parenthesis to be explicit about the ordering of operations.

Thus assume only + - and * / are unambiguous, everything else be explicit about ordering.

EG: ∫((x^2)/2)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#226

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The future of education is plain text

#227

Post by com2kid »

Pxtl wrote: post #221
com2kid wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bun…

So in other words I shouldn't hold my breath for this to appear on NuGet. That's a shame. It seems like it would play nicely with MarkDown.

I fired off an email to the team responsible. :)

Please post over on https://wpdev.uservoice.com/ and get others to upvote! If internal and external asks line up, it becomes much easier to argue in favor of doing a feature.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#228

Post by polygot »

While plain text is compatible with virtually 100% of every OS ever, when I try to open a txt file on my windows machine it asks what application to open it in, since there are no default apps (Windows 7 and earlier.) This might make it appear that plain text files are a "special" format because it doesn't open up when you double click on it.

I have sent plain text files to some of my colleagues in the past (so that there is a 100% chance that they could read the file), and they were unable to open them because of this issue with choosing the default application, and asked me what app they needed to download to view the files.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#229

Post by prawn »

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.…

Maybe not just writer/reader, but also a presenter. In the context of education, a teacher will often be using someone else's material but presenting in their own style.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#230

Post by emodendroket »

TuringTest wrote: post #211
emodendroket wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're just like every other standard on the Web, basically.

Other standards, and web standards in particular, tend to have several open source implementations to guarantee that it's possible to build tools that support it without being the reference implementation. OOXML has no such thing, and the reference implementation is closed source, so it's basically impossible to replicate in any practical sense.

There aren't several implementations of Office Open XML formats in open source projects? I don't think that's accurate.
Post reply on HN