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Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

nota-lang.org

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Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#111

Post by eviks »

mr_mitm wrote: post #101
eviks wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of developing quarto, one could have simply written a LaTeX class that defines a function like so: If it's so simple, why isn't there QuarTeX that does all of that and removes the extreme verbosity barrier?

Because doing something like this is opinionated. The LaTeX developers try to do the opposite: they want to provide packages that cover as many usecases as possible. And users of LaTeX are probably not knowledgeable enough or too busy to publish their opinionated subset of LaTeX as a class. I don't know for sure. There is no central body that has an interest in removing barriers, so you might as well ask me or yourse…

> they want to provide packages that cover as many usecases as possible.

How would this macro exclude the coverage of other use cases? The language primitives would still be there to do the original code

> There is no central body

That's true for plenty of other syntaxes that at the same time aren't like this

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#112

Post by hesk »

DistractionRect wrote: post #12
jxf wrote: post #4

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…

> I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more. Dynamism is great for web _apps_, but it's the last thing I want in a document

The example academic paper has puts the definition of variables into a tooltip when you click on them. That's a nice feature for academic papers.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#113

Post by mr_mitm »

eviks wrote: post #111
mr_mitm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because doing something like this is opinionated. The LaTeX developers try to do the opposite: they want to provide packages that cover as many usecases as possible. And users of LaTeX are probably not knowledgeable enough or too busy to publish their opinionated subset of LaTeX as a class. I don't know for sure. There is no central body that has an interest in removing barriers, so you might as well ask me or yourse…

> they want to provide packages that cover as many usecases as possible. How would this macro exclude the coverage of other use cases? The language primitives would still be there to do the original code > There is no central body That's true for plenty of other syntaxes that at the same time aren't like this

As I said: Maybe you want to specify a different placement option like `b` instead of `t`. Maybe you don't want the label equal to the file path, in particular if you happen to include an image twice.

Or you don't want it centered. Or you want several images in one figure environment arranged in some way. Or you want to scale the included image to fit only 70% of the page width. Or maybe you want to rotate the included image by 90 degrees. Many more use cases are imaginable.

You could define the macro to cover all of this, but then you might as well just write the original code.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#114

Post by seanhunter »

dash2 wrote: post #64
wcrichton wrote: post #46

Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…

Can I make a simple point? As an academic, 99% of my time is spent doing two things: 1. Writing statistical computations using a language like R or python. 2. Writing English text. The most important thing about a document language is that it should prioritize those things. For example, here's why Rmarkdown/Quarto is better than TeX. A TeX document starts: \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \u…

The difference is you know the easy way to get what you want in rmarkdown/quarto but only know the hard way in latex?

My latex docs look nothing like that because I put all the boiler plate in a .sty file.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#115

Post by pbronez »

esquivalience wrote: post #80
SanderNL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Style and substance separation is easy and should be a requirement. Legal is pure text "programming" and what I mean is that the style of the text has zero bearing on the judicial process. The benefits of working at the proper level of abstraction compound. It enables tech like diffs and git, which then nicely solves a bunch of other problems as well. Using Word completely side-steps all those benefits. Sure, you get…

I think markdown might be the solution here.

Markdown isn’t detailed enough for legal stuff. Internal references, tables, complex section numbering require extensive post processing or simply don’t work. You quickly wind up with a lot of hidden magic that frustrates people used to word.

Last time I lost patience with doing Legal stuff in word and evaluated alternatives, I was most optimistic about Asciidoc. Unfortunately the ecosystem was relatively anemic… the strong syntax was limited by the tooling.

Looks like there’s been some improvement, maybe I’ll try again. There’s a nice new homepage at least: https://asciidoc.org/

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#116

Post by seanhunter »

dash2 wrote: post #75
nanna wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the problem. If 99% of your documents need the same packages and formatting, then all you need to do in LaTeX is create a template (eg via Yasnippet in Emacs) or dump it all in a LaTeX class file and then import it in your frontmatter, and Bob's your uncle. There are many frustrating things about LaTeX but I don't see how this is one of them.

Probably that's true. But first, I don't know how to create a class file, or a template (if that is a LaTeX thing). And since I've never seen anyone else do this, I guess that most academics don't either. Second, my point isn't just about the specific issue, it's that this issue reveals how TeX thinks about the world. It thinks you want to spend your time writing TeX. No, I want to spend my time writing English. Here…

That’s a great of the tradeoff. On the surface the latex version looks harder, but you can specify a caption, how the figure floats with other items, how it’s justified, the zoom level, you can add a reference label that you can hyperlink to from elsewhere in the doc, etc etc etc.

The markdown one you get what you get. Maybe that’s fine. If it isn’t you are out of luck.

The latex one requires more of you but gives you much more functionality in return.

Which is better is going to be entirely situational/personal preference.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#117

Post by lallysingh »

jacobolus wrote: post #48
lallysingh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out the example of the PLDI paper. There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help. I think that there's interesting open space for dynamic documents, but you need some good examples of people using it with taste.

You mean this one? https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/ One unfortunate problem is that nobody bothered setting the measure for legibility. On my display the text block is far far too wide. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length (while we're talking about typography, the fonts for body copy and code are mismatched in size in a distracting way) As far as formulas/notation is concerned, the…

They were helpful for me, an ex-grad-student who read some type theory years ago. I think anyone breaking into the topic would appreciate that.

Requiring authors to publish two versions to make it accessible, when the motivated reader just needs a little comfort, is too high a bar. Let them write densely for their primary audience (and this pass peer review) and still give affordances for everyone else.

As for width, font, etc, a stylesheet can fix that. I'm assuming they allow stylesheets to format for each venue appropriately.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#118

Post by balakc »

wcrichton wrote: post #46

Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…

Looks quite nice!

While LaTeX is cool, and I use it extensively, I personally feel that it has not adapted quickly to various use cases. It is not _easy_ to compile into different formats for consumption, and sometimes the layout issues are quite hard to debug. Efforts such as these, even if they do not take off, might give the LaTeX community enough to think about what to focus on for improvement...

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#119

Post by gbalduzzi »

xeyownt wrote: post #87
mr_mitm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your frustration. Maybe it helps to know where this problem comes from. TeX is extremely powerful and lets you create arbitrary documents. This is the first time I heard of quarto, but apparently it makes a lot of choices for you that you understandably don't really care about. Instead of developing quarto, one could have simply written a LaTeX class that defines a function like so: \newcommand{\image}[2…

Yes, and with tools like ChatGPT it's even easier to write TeX documents. I exposed this very problem and ChatGPT proposed exactly the same solution, and also another one using a custom environment.

That is just an expression of the LaTex problem though.

People (as in, the majority of people) will not be comfortable using a tool that is so unintuitive and hard to use that you need to use an AI to help you in writing.

Writing a document is not supposed to be hard and require assistance to do.

Re: Nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts

#120

Post by nine_k »

wcrichton wrote: post #46

Hi, Nota creator here. A high-level comment: After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like: - How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368 - How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-…

Curiously, all these problems, and more, have been reasonably solved in Org Mode. Sadly, too few people know about it because too few people use Emacs.
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