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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#241

Post by albertgoeswoof »

ajarmst wrote: post #240

I find anything but plain text irritating when writing (I dislike attempts to merge the creative process of writing with the only peripherally related creative processes of orthography, layout and printing). The WYSIAYG editor "revolution" and the associated explosion of opague untranslatable binary file formats did us all a huge disservice. My students learn fairly quickly that my warning that assignments submitted…

>only peripherally related creative process of orthography, layout and printing

I think you should rethink this a little, constraining or adapting your medium will provide you with different results that can be better or worse, depending on your goal of writing.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#242

Post by white-flame »

austincheney wrote: post #37

What many developers either don't understand or refuse to accept is that when it comes to distribution you don't control formatting. It doesn't matter if that white space is explicit like white space characters or inferred from rules like CSS. There is a naive assumption that all platforms and operating systems will treat your text (everything is either text or binary before it is parsed into something else) equally.…

Text is text, isn�t it?

Re: The future of education is plain text

#243

Post by jimjimjim »

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.

I have done a lot of work with code for handling pdfs.

The spec is 1000+ pages, references other docs, has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate

Re: The future of education is plain text

#244

Post by ekns »

Dangeranger wrote: post #96

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…

Unfortunately org-mode is not backwards-compatible and there have been many changes which break things unnecessarily.

For example, I once attempted to run this org-mode "notebook", ironically titled "Reproducible Research with Emacs Org-mode", and found I had to make significant cosmetic changes to get it to build: https://github.com/eliask/orgmode-iKNOW2012

Maybe things have improved since, but backwards compatibility is important for these kinds of formats.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#245

Post by mikebenfield »

Theodores wrote: post #119
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.

TeX is completely avoidable. I have never used it apart from at university decades ago, before I learned Word. I have done proper science jobs where papers get written but still not needed TeX. Furthermore, in all my years surfing the internet, I have never downloaded a TeX file willingly or unwittingly.

It varies by field. Try publishing in Math, CS, or Physics without using TeX.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#249

Post by thearn4 »

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…

I'm building course notes right now for a college class using markdown & MathML/LaTeX, that i'll be hosting on Github pages for the students to browse. It's by far the best balance that I've come across yet.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#250

Post by austincheney »

white-flame wrote: post #242
austincheney wrote: post #37

What many developers either don't understand or refuse to accept is that when it comes to distribution you don't control formatting. It doesn't matter if that white space is explicit like white space characters or inferred from rules like CSS. There is a naive assumption that all platforms and operating systems will treat your text (everything is either text or binary before it is parsed into something else) equally.…

Text is text, isn�t it?

It is. When a machine modifies it in transit it is still text... just not the text you thought you sent/requested.
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