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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#261

Post by karthikb »

JohnHammersley wrote: post #195
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…

If you're interested in adding LaTeX to that list, you might like to try Overleaf [1] -- it's an online collaborative LaTeX editor we built to try to lower the learning curve (I'm one of the founders). It includes a rich text mode for easier collaboration with non-LaTeX users [2], and you can also write in Markdown if you like :) [3]. Feedback always appreciated if you do give it a try, thanks. [1] https://www.overle…

Overleaf was invaluable while I wrote my thesis. Thank you!

Re: The future of education is plain text

#262

Post by gkya »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #254
gkya wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

That's what hyperlinks are. They even have the better property that they don't break if you change the font size for the whole text.

They don't mean much in a classroom of say 30 or 40. A lecturer will have n people with n texts and will have to synchronise them. In a typical lesson you jump to different pages also non-sequentially. The best option is a PDF etc. that you can optionally print. Anything else is a recipe for chaos, especially if you're not in a CS classroom.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#263

Post by accordionclown »

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.

pshaw.

right now, today, tuesday june 13th, 2017, safari will not open a .pdf to a specific page or bookmark, neither on the desktop nor in ios.

chrome can. firefox can. but safari cannot. which means neither the iphone nor the ipad can do it.

imagine if -- on the web -- you couldn't deep-link to an anchor in the middle of a webpage, but merely to (the top of) the webpage itself.

that's not the only deficiency of the .pdf format. it's not even the most galling one. it's just the one that happens to be hamstringing a certain project of mine at the moment. and it's illustrative.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#265

Post by dredmorbius »

mxuribe wrote: post #124
SamReidHughes wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have had tool problems if you had just went with Word?

To be devil's advocate, that's like the recipient stating something like: "sorry, we only accept manuscripts in blue ink, and not black ink (not for functional reasons, just historical reasons/habits".

Brown M&Ms.

http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

Re: The future of education is plain text

#266

Post by sooheon »

drostie wrote: post #59
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 a joke. I mean, it's not a joke for its intended purpose; that's fine. It typesets the #$@! out of documents. But TeX is a joke for mathematical notation in particular. Put another way: the best way to understand what an arbitrary mathematical expression in LaTeX really means, is to render it as an image and read that image. TeX can be understood best as a concise way of writing a certain class of vector image…

Very well said. I only use TeX over Word for writing math because emacs 1. makes writing it easy with macros and helper functions, and 2. is able to display the rendered visual snippets inline in the text. If I could not have the second feature, TeX would be borderline unusable, and this dependence on editors and tooling means it's not truly open. Can't envision what could be better for mathematical notation in plain text, though.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#267

Post by dredmorbius »

gech wrote: post #14
peterburkimsher wrote: post #6

What about the existing "standard", PowerPoint slides and PDFs? Although most of my notes could be plain-text, any graphs or figures need pictures. ASCII art doesn't cut it.

Are you stating that there are people that like pdfs?

Given a sufficient device it's actually a fairly decent format. The problem is that that device has to relatively closely correspond to printed paper sizes, within a factor of about 75% - 125%.

What PDF offers is a consistent, space-persistent, formatted output. For reading longer works, it actually does matter to me where a passage appears on a page, or within a work. Spatial memory is important that way.

I read a lot of material, in a lot of different formats: paged text (manpages, console-mode browsers), formatted HTML, ePubs, DJVU, image-scanned books.

If I'm reading on a largish (9-10") tablet, PDF in one-page-up format is actually really good. Fills the screen, is almost always suitably readable. Scans of old books (thank you, Internet Archive and Google) in particular are a delight -- there's something about reading a century-plus-old library copy with markings and (hopefully not too much) marginalia, as well as the original typesetting and images.

The main problem I have with fluid formats ultimately is their fluidity. I realise that that's perverse, and that there are times when it's a real benefit, but again, I can't seem to get away from that spatial memory thing.

If I'm extracting content from works, I prefer source (LaTeX, Markdown, DocBook, etc.). Though that's another story.

The ability to spin out formats on demand would be an ideal. I'm looking into ways of doing that.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#268

Post by Sodman »

I completely agree. After spending hours trying to programatically read something as 'common' as a PDF [not all .pdf files are created equal, I learned] - I'm totally on the side of the "Give me the content and I'll deal with the formatting" mentality.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#269

Post by overdunk »

coldtea wrote: post #196
gkya wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean compared to structured file formats like JSON, YAML, TOML, XML and whatever (including binary such). Obviously it's not harder to parse than a PDF.

Uh, "plain text" is not a pair of words that I would use to describe "structured data" at all. I don't even know what someone would intend to mean in such a situation.

If someone told me they needed me to parse a "plain text" file, to me it sounds like they'd want me to provide some statistics on an unstructured text blob.

Free form text does have properties, such as byte length, character count, word count, line count, sentence count, paragraph count, and so on. Most of which is simply variations on whitespace delimiters.

But an individual plain text file... all on its own? Could be a shell script? Could be a newspaper clipping? Could be a dictionary file? Could be an array of XYZ vertices, edges and faces? Could be all of the above, and an email signature at the end?

Someone tells me: "here have this plain text object," and I presume it is a monolithic blob of ASCII, if I'm lucky, and maybe it's War and Peace or Moby Dick expressed in emoji if I'm not.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#270

Post by edoceo »

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…

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