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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#341

Post by aqsalose »

ferdterguson wrote: post #286
aqsalose wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using LaTeX for about 5 years now. I don't recommend picking up TeX notation for reading maths in plaintext. It's the nicest way to produce nice looking mathematics PDFs or MathJax, if you have a powerful text editor. And after a while, you learn things like "underscore is for subscript" and "^ is for superscript". But the point is, mathematics written as a plaintext document needs an interpreter, unless yo…

Not sure if you are aware of detexify [0], but it recognizes my trackpad-scratch quite well. The backend and all of the training data are open source, so you could indeed implement this yourself if you wanted. I'd buy mobile app any LaTeX OCR software. [0] http://detexify.kirelabs.org

Yes, detexify is amazing! That's probablly how I got the idea in the first place... "Imagine if detexify would automatically read all of my math writing, not symbol by symbol what I draw with mouse."

Re: The future of education is plain text

#342

Post by mirimir »

u801e wrote: post #334
mirimir wrote: post #288

> Plain text is always compatible This person has obviously never been tasked with reading text files from old mainframes.

EBCDIC? I think that some terminal programs were able to translate between that and ASCII (like Kermit).

Yeah, that.

I was using Windows at the time. I finally discovered UltraEdit.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#343

Post by prestonbriggs »

icc97 wrote: post #306
prestonbriggs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm over 60 and have been using TeX since '85. Same manual after all these years... I still seem to be able to learn new stuff, though it's not always clear it's worth the bother.

So I'm guessing you were 28-38 when you learned TeX, rather than 60+. If you were over 60 in 1985 and are still posting to HN, that would be really cool.

Indeed, I was 30 and my brain was still plastic. Really, the only notable thing from my post was the fact I'm still using the same Latex manual after all these years. Kinda ragged now, but still useful.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#344

Post by austincheney »

u801e wrote: post #329
austincheney wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. Documents passed through email tend to get mutilated by each application that touches it, such as: email servers, user agent applications, and sometimes network proxies and other application tools on the line. Microsoft applications were huge offenders, particularly MS Exchange which added all kinds of c…

> That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. My testing was limited to three commercial SMTP servers that I had credentials for. One of them was the SMTP server that I could access using my Hotmail account credentials. Other than changing the Message-Id header that I had manually set in the test message I was sending, I wasn't able to to see any…

Try putting HTML with some exotic CSS (inline of course because this is email). Ensure that CSS contains some position absolutes and other properties that allows presentation outside the accepted bounds.

Also put some JavaScript in there and see what it does.

I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document. The document, from the perspective of SMTP 821/281/5321 (and so forth) is still just plain text.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#345

Post by u801e »

austincheney wrote: post #344
u801e wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That might be true in theory but it certainly isn't true in practice. I know because I have done this work before. My testing was limited to three commercial SMTP servers that I had credentials for. One of them was the SMTP server that I could access using my Hotmail account credentials. Other than changing the Message-Id header that I had manually set in the test message I was sending, I wasn't able to to see any…

Try putting HTML with some exotic CSS (inline of course because this is email). Ensure that CSS contains some position absolutes and other properties that allows presentation outside the accepted bounds. Also put some JavaScript in there and see what it does. I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document. The document, f…

> I guarantee Hotmail will destroy the original document [containing HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript] and do so in such a way that the document evolves from machine that touches the document.

I'm not disagreeing with you here and you're most likely correct. Exchange has historically not complied with SMTP RFCs. I'll try it out and see how it changes just to satisfy my curiosity.

I suspect that you were to send email like you specified through Postfix, Sendmail, or Exim, it wouldn't be altered before being sent to the next MTA or delivered to the user's mailbox.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#346

Post by JohnHammersley »

karthikb wrote: post #261
JohnHammersley wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Congratulations on your thesis -- it's a lot of work, and I'm glad Overleaf helped :)

Re: The future of education is plain text

#347

Post by ReverseCold »

polygot wrote: post #308
ReverseCold wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure .txt opens in notepad..?

It does, but sometimes the line breaks don't show up so it's all on one line with what appears to be tabs. WordPad works fine though.

Save your .txt files with CRLF(Windows) line endings, not LF (Linux) or CR (Mac). Your txt files should now work on all (relevant) OS.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#348

Post by accordionclown »

kbenson wrote: post #338
accordionclown wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown. it's fairly easy to get the brain-dead part "right". even down to replicating gruber's original bugs and his corner-case complications. > They are inconsistent in their extensions. that's precisely my point. and the crux of the problem. > Markdown was meant to codify already in use norms markdown's markup did not differ significantly from that of asciidoc or re…

> since nobody is meant to actually _read_ raw markdown, i've never understood why everyone cites that passage so religiously, other than that is part of the origin story mythology. Because that's not a universal feel, and some people do read it. I write a subset of markdown normally in text. I use asterisks for bold, use a hash for section headings, and use unordered and ordered lists as defined. I value that I writ…

back from the school reunion.

my only note now is that i was never trying to "persuade" you. or anyone else. think whatever you like, wrong or right.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#349

Post by [deleted] »

rubidium wrote: post #271
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…

That's.... pretty much my exact experience (oh, I get to add multiple years of latex use). Html or plaintext is all I trust now. A nice editor on top of it and I'm good. If you have to do larger document writing, I recommend Madcap Flare.

[deleted]
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