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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

#131

Post by nicce »

CJefferson wrote: post #20
troymc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a modern take: https://typst.app/

For me, there is one fundamental issue which makes me want to switch from LaTeX -- it can't produce accessible documents (and good HTML would do just fine as accessible). LaTeX is making good progress in this area. Amazingly (to me) it seems typst is doing even worse than LaTeX, while starting much later! I'm happy to be told they have succeeded in this area of course.

While the accessibility is an important area, it affects minority of the people. You need to get the core functionality first before you can spend resources on accessibility.

Latex is very old and has the features; they can focus on accessibility now.

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

#132

Post by enriquto »

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…

> in quarto - it's just markdown:

    >    ![Caption](path/to/image.png)
> And here is how you do it in TeX:

    >    \begin{figure}[t]
    >    \includegraphics{path/to/image}
    >    \centering
    >    \end{figure}
This is not the same thing! The LaTeX equivalent to your markdown would be

     \includegraphics{path/to/image.png}
which is arguably simpler and cleaner than the markdown. The figure environment is unnecessary when you just want to put a figure right there. You only need the figure environment when you want your image to "float" to a random place in your page.

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

#133

Post by simpaticoder »

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-…

Wow, Nota looks good. I created something similar I call "Literate Markdown"[1], a play on Knuth's "Literate programming" concept. My focus from the beginning was interleaving computation with explaination. It's been a lot of fun to work with for the last few months, for example to explore ideas around SVG animation[2] or flesh out a novel datastructure/algorithm[3]. Also, its about 500 lines of legible node code that is the entire server and markdown processor with very few dependencies, no transitive dependencies and it does not require a compilation step. By default the server allows no 3rd party resources, or cookies, of any kind because why not. It's MIT licensed on github. I want to move it to an organization repo instead of my personal repo and clean up the repo in the process, which is happening today.

1 - https://simpatico.io/lit Literate markdown reference.

2 - https://simpatico.io/svg svg animation using object to elt scattering and a RAF pump

3 - https://simpatico.io/stree3 A navigable n-arry representation of diverging, deterministic state

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

#134

Post by Digit-Al »

function_seven wrote: post #52
anon35 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications? There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page). But they are, universally: dynamic. Ex…

When I was a kid, we called it "multimedia". Encarta being the example that comes to mind. My school library had some other interactive encyclopedia that came on a 6–CD-ROM magazine changer (the Pioneer style, if you remember music CD changers). I remember being absolutely flabbergasted at the sheer amount of megabytes sitting in that unassuming disc magazine. That term is really quaint these days, and it doesn't ful…

Interactive media?

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

#135

Post by astrobe_ »

nologic01 wrote: post #100

The problem with any new initiative in this space is that it enters a field that is more than well populated. It doesn't matter if existing solutions are less than perfect. Its like walking into a historic European city that has architecture going back millennia and arguing for a great new building design. Greenfield space is scarce and people will not just demolish old structures to try something new. They need to s…

If you want a decentralized web, a "Userweb" (maybe to parallel a bit Usenet), in my view you need a BitTorrent-like protocol.

You need efficient documents formats, which means formats that don't try to do everything, which means that you have to segregate different document types in different files - e.g. tables in some standard spreadsheet format - in contrast to HTML that tries to do tables, graphic (SVG), etc. on its own.

Separating each thing in their own file lets the user choose which programs they want to view/manipulate documents (rather that the one-size-fits-all browser), help with distribution across the network, and help with low storage/low bandwidth situations (or do more with the hardware we have right now).

So from my perspective, the answer is negative: there's nothing new to invent. Specialize and refine what was already invented.

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

#136

Post by cactusfrog »

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…

Reading smresearch papers on BART is really annoying right now so I’m a fan of this project.

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

#137

Post by teddyh »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #97
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of these markup languages. The reason none of them really challenge tex/latex in its own space, is that they don't aim to do what tex/latex does. Latex is "typographically-complete". Markdown and friends are explicitly not. HTML+CSS is. But what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as p…

> what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as possible, to not interfere with the content that the human is writing I could not disagree more. LaTeX syntax is not 'clunky', it's a mess, and has intentionally been engineered right from the start to be clever rather than consistent. And it's not the synt…

> In order to use numerical codepoints to write 東京, you can write any of:

There’s a simpler way:

  \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
  
  東京

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

#138

Post by professoretc »

enriquto wrote: post #132
dash2 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> in quarto - it's just markdown: > ![Caption](path/to/image.png) > And here is how you do it in TeX: > \begin{figure}[t] > \includegraphics{path/to/image} > \centering > \end{figure} This is not the same thing! The LaTeX equivalent to your markdown would be \includegraphics{path/to/image.png} which is arguably simpler and cleaner than the markdown. The figure environment is unnecessary when you just want to put a fi…

> You only need the figure environment when you want your image to "float" to a random place in your page.

Which is also something the Markdown version can't do at all (give fine control over how the image is positioned). You have to use raw HTML plus probably some CSS if you want that.

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

#139

Post by Ar-Curunir »

auggierose wrote: post #43

I like the idea! So basically, a better and modern LaTeX. I've had the same idea for a while now, for example the ability to reference definitions, etc. But I think Nota goes about this a bit too heavy-handed: % let nota = @Smallcaps{**Nota**} .@Definition[name: "nota", label: nota]{ #nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts. } That's 4 mentions of `nota` to introduce a definition…

You can just replace the name and label with whatever you want. Also in general you’ll be referencing an item much more frequently than you’ll be defining it.

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

#140

Post by todd8 »

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

One of the interesting things that I discovered while working on some legal papers with a lawyer were that legal documents don't have copyright protection. Lawyers regularly copy and paste from other lawyers work. I suppose, that since legislators most often have backgrounds as lawyers, they legislated rules for themselves that are not the same as the rule the rest of us have to follow.

I am not a lawyer so I don't know that anything in the previous paragraph is true; it's just based on a recollection of something I was told once a long time ago.

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