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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

#121

Post by Metus »

manxman wrote: post #57
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-…

Just my two cents - Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience. Sure if performance is a real issue then rust makes more sense than JS but I’m not sure that’s going to be hugely meaningful in most use cases. I’ve never been a fan of Latex despite writing some mammoth documents over the years. Latex always felt like a beast for academics not for business. Yet there’s o…

I always disliked that it was so difficult to interact with Word if you wanted to create automated documents. Instead I'd love it if there was a developer-first experience to create standardised documents from nice looking participation certificates, invoices, memos, documentation up to multi-tome histories.

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

#122

Post by Uptrenda »

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-…

You should definitely look more into restructured text btw. It lets you build documents for many different formats, it has a nice way to reference sections of documents, add code support, and seems to have all the basic features you need. It is very similar to markdown but writing something in restructured text means you can output in just about any document format you need (its much better than markdown or html, imo.)

Your question about content and computation is difficult. When I was writing docs for my side project I would have liked to have done something similar to having an interpreter run in the page itself and have interactive code you can play with. But such an approach wasn't quite practical (ive seen some top-tier docs do this though!.) Though I ended up writing all my code examples in such a way that they're tested in the unittests. So I at least know if anything breaks.

Good luck with the project

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

#123

Post by nabla9 »

fbdab103 wrote: post #7
kstrauser wrote: post #3

So: * More in the space of LaTeX than Markdown (but with elements of each). * Written in JavaScript (so lots of of people can contribute in a language they already know). * MIT license. Nice! I don't know that I have an immediate use for it today, but this looks super nifty. If I did want to write something that needed some LaTeX-y features, and wasn't aiming for publication in a place that required it, I'd give Nota…

TeX was definitely groundbreaking, but I consider it a product of its time. Far too much cleverness in macro expansions and weaving tricks to keep memory usage in check for what are now laughable limits. Missing far too many niceties in comparison to modern languages with more guardrails to protect yourself from silly mistakes. The only way I can write Latex is to heavily rely upon \input{} segments to keep isolated…

TeX is still unparalleled in layout and all fine details. But writeing Tex/Latex every day is not the best way to do it.

The correct way to do it is:

Your favorite markup -> pandoc script and includes -> Latex

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

#124

Post by BuboBubo »

I am currently writing and formatting a very long document using:

- Pandoc Markdown and Pandoc : https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html

- PagedJS : https://pagedjs.org/

- Make & Python as glue and helpers for compilation

I manage my references using Zotero like any other academic writer. The configuration is less than 100 lines and I can get a pretty solid result using only basic HTML/CSS skills intertwined with Markdown. You sometimes end up with weird formatting issues but there is nothing you can't fix using HTML/CSS/JS. My manuscript has images, figures, tables, code, etc...

It's good to see people trying to tackle the problem of formatting documents again. LaTeX is good but not for everything and the ecosystem is extremely hard to understand. Word, Pages and other similar tools are... proprietary. What would be a game changer for my use case is to see something like Scrivener with more formatting/layout options: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

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

#125

Post by eviks »

mr_mitm wrote: post #113
eviks wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 includ…

And as I replied: how does any of this *prevent* you from "cover[ing] as many usecases as possible" given that writing the original code is always an option?

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

#126

Post by usrusr »

celim307 wrote: post #62
manxman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my two cents - Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience. Sure if performance is a real issue then rust makes more sense than JS but I’m not sure that’s going to be hugely meaningful in most use cases. I’ve never been a fan of Latex despite writing some mammoth documents over the years. Latex always felt like a beast for academics not for business. Yet there’s o…

Surprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests

A moment of imagining how that would influence the market value of certain skillsets should easily cure you from that surprise ;)

On the other hand, legal systems have effectively been doing the equivalent of git since basically forever. There have been very few law books written from the ground up. All other law authoring, be it by kings, priests, dictators or parliaments, was I the form of diffs to an existing codebase.

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

#127

Post by pseingatl »

manxman wrote: post #69
celim307 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests

Cause git ain’t user friendly enough for lawyers and they use word not a plain text editor which doesnt make it easy to see the diffs. But yes ;)

Lawyers have gotten rid of secretaries and so spend time (and billing) futzing around with document formatting, fonts, margins, bullets, numbering, autonumbering and the like.

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

#128

Post by hadley »

dash2 wrote: post #66
lencastre wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks amazing that typst!!

What are the similarities and differences between it and quarto?

Quarto will support output to typst in the upcoming 1.4 release: https://quarto.org/docs/prerelease/1.4/typst.html

I think the big different between quarto and typst is the scope. quarto is a tool for combining prose and computation to generate many different output types (HTML, PDF (via latex), PDF (via typst), PPT, ...) through the power of markdown/pandoc. typst is a typesetting system for turning plain-text markup in to beautiful PDFs.

I think you're much more likely to want to write typst by hand than latex, but out of the box it doesn't provide any tooling for combining writing and computing (if that matters to you).

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

#129

Post by alas44 »

celim307 wrote: post #62
manxman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just my two cents - Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience. Sure if performance is a real issue then rust makes more sense than JS but I’m not sure that’s going to be hugely meaningful in most use cases. I’ve never been a fan of Latex despite writing some mammoth documents over the years. Latex always felt like a beast for academics not for business. Yet there’s o…

Surprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests

Actually the little known "Review" feature of word allows to visually track approve/reject/comment collaborative changes over a document in a really user friendly way, not need for git here

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

#130

Post by sampo »

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-…

> https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368

Did you use Nota to write this paper?

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