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The Art of Plain Text (2015)

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Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#51
post #21

Complexity of storage/presentation formats can indeed compromise accessibility and longevity. However, trying to enforce plain text on everything can be detrimental to the quality and fidelity of information. Of course, it very much depends on the context - technical documents may not need images as much as a travelling blog would. That's why it's important to use plain text as necessary , rather than always. The sam…

I agree. I prefer html or md formatted "plain text" files. There is a reason books have different looking text and picture back hundreds and thousands of years. Plain text might be sufficient in a lot of cases but it's certainly not preferable in a lot of case. I do prefer html/md to any sort of binary format or proprietary one though for portability and universality.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#52
Resist the use of images? A picture says more than a 1000 words. Humans are visual beings. We see patterns everywhere, a good illustration is often very necessary in order to fully comprehend text. Each letter is really an illustration. The composition of the article and form of the text is very visual.

To just use pure text for everything is extreme. To resist the use of images, absolutely, but we cannot do without.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#53

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

Assuming you know the language (otherwise you wouldn't be able to read the article :-P) you can still write in English.

I speak Greek but all my notes, text, etc are in English, which also helps if i want to share them at some point with others.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#54
Today, plain text adoption often implies markdown for a richer experience. There are loads of markdown apps on the app stores, but the lesser-known org markup continues to fly under the radar. Quite possibly because of its Emacs origin (and many folks moving to other editors), but org is still plain text (and super powerful). We can all benefit from wider adoption beyond Emacs.

I built two org-powered apps for iOS myself:

https://plainorg.com

https://flathabits.com

There are other great ones out there:

https://beorg.app

https://braintool.org

https://logseq.com

https://organice.200ok.ch

https://orgro.org

http://orgzly.com

Shoutout to Karl Voit who's been driving org markup awareness outside of Emacs with Orgdown https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown. He's also discussed org markup's strengths at https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#55
post #42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These languages have developed ways to cope because of SMS.

German somewhat has (e.g., you write "ue" instead of "ü", "ss" for "ß", as in "suess"), but Spanish certainly hasn't. Saying that Spanish can be written in us-ascii is about the same as saying that English could cope if you removed the h and the y — it would still be understandable, right? Us-ascii Spanish "?d'onde est'a la biblioteca?" is as pleasant as, uh, "w^ere is t^e librarv?" I agree with most of this article…

The work arounds in German exist, but they are rarely used and look extremely inelegant. Even before smartphones with virtual keyboards became common many people preferred to press a few extra keys in their SMS to get the correct Umlaut than to write ue, ae, oe, ..

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#56

Kind of ironic how an article that praises plaintext shows up as absolute garbage on my iPhone with or without reader mode.

It's because the article isn't plain text; it's pre-formatted text. Real plain text is great because your browser can re-flow it. Here the author has added hard linebreaks to disable this useful feature. I can't think of any good reason to do this.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#57

> Resist the temptation to use images. If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem. This is really hard to agree with. There are some things text just isn’t good for, like sheet music or color theory. There are also many readers and authors for whom big chunks of text are hard to digest.

... or teaching people to cut hair.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#58
post #46

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.

I disagree. Even in 2015, pretending ASCII was a workable universal format involved either pretending non-occidental languages didn't exist, or, as I darkly suspect is the case with many US-based computer scientists, forgetting their existence entirely.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Org mode also let's you tangle your code chunks into separate files. And you can specify different files (or the same) for different chunks so you can kinda have programs split into files while doing everything in org. I really like this feature, I used to use Knitr but I don't think it's possible to tangle different chunks to different files.

Org-babel is a treasure and I much prefer it to Jupyter. However, while org-babel is feature-rich in obscure ways that I constantly discover, it's still missing some out-of-the-box convenience like automated figure management and running multiple code blocks (like running code blocks to the middle of the page - not all the way through).

There is org-babel-excute-subtree but that only helps if what you want to run is in a subtree I guess.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#60

> Resist the temptation to use images. If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem. This is really hard to agree with. There are some things text just isn’t good for, like sheet music or color theory. There are also many readers and authors for whom big chunks of text are hard to digest.

There is an enormously frustrating segment of the software development community who seemingly refuse to imagine that there might be others with different language and communication needs than their own, and their particular formulation of plain text may be particularly unsuitable for those needs.

As a physicist, yes, I wouldn't necessarily disagree that it is important to be able to distil concepts into language, but the language of mathematics happens to be very poorly supported by the computer-specific idea of 'plain text'. I have had too many times in the past when sending plain text emails meant filling emails with pseudo-latex equations and hoping that the recipients would be able to understand them, or needing to attach a PDF with the actual content. Translating the concepts entirely into a foreign language like English prose wouldn't help in understanding, it would just be ridiculous and inefficient. Similarly, if I'm showing experimental data, or any sort of graph, again, the language is not feasibly translatable into plain text. Markdown and well-formatted HTML and MathML emails with modern email clients allow me to communicate in the languages I actually need to write in, and express the concepts I actually need to express, in the forms they are most efficiently expressed in. Communications systems that support mathematics and images well are extremely useful for these other languages as well. As you point out, music has a similar problem: yes, it's probably reasonable to say that concepts should be able to expressed in language, but the language to express the concepts isn't supported by plain text.

And these different fields and languages do intersect, but that segment remains stubborn. For example, expecting all discussion of what a function in a maths library does to be entirely in plain text just to satisfy the affectations of a fanatical few would be unreasonable. Yet they do their best to impose. We see statements like these. We see services that might otherwise be useful needlessly enforce and evangelize their particular views on plain text. If anything, the fanatics become increasingly fanatical and unwilling to compromise: it becomes not just HTML and images that are decried, but any non-plaintext rendering of Markdown, or anything that isn't ASCII, or text that isn't hard-broken to 72 characters (or, in the case of this particular message, demands even on the particular style of English). It becomes not just a preference, but that non-plaintext messages should be attacked, or their authors aggressively educated on proper communication and etiquette, or non-plaintext messages be rejected entirely. I prefer chalkboards to whiteboards, but I am not going to storm out of a talk as soon as the speaker picks up a dry erase marker. Non intret Cato...

The rest of the world moves on, of course, and that segment likely wonder why they are disliked.

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