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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

#141

Post by CJefferson »

nicce wrote: post #131
CJefferson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I completely disagree. You need to design accessibility in from the start, it's almost impossible to retrofit. Very few systems manage to add high-quality accessibility later on.

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

#142

Post by jessriedel »

Calavar wrote: post #54
jessriedel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you need is re-flowable text for this, right? That's generally not considered dynamic.

If you follow the comment trail back up, in the context of this conversation, static means PDF, hard constraints of physical page layouts; dynamic means HTML, digital, no hard layout constraints.

I had read all those comments. What I'm saying that is that re-flowable text is just in a very different class than web pages that auto-translate the text, have animations, or run arbitrary code.

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

#143

Post by lallysingh »

romwell wrote: post #56
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.

>There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help. That can also really mess with screen readers and other accessibility features. There's a reason PDF/A spec forbids scripts in any PDF documents that are expected to be available in the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

This is a good point. Can a similar markup mechanism help make accessibility easier? Equations are compact to the eye but can be really unpleasant read out loud.

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

#144

Post by xamde »

pbronez wrote: post #115
esquivalience wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The IntelliJ AsciiDoc plugin is a little juwel with all bells and whistles, Syntax highlight, Preview, structure view, even refactoring of references. We use it together with Antora.

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

#145

Post by nicce »

CJefferson wrote: post #141
nicce wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I completely disagree. You need to design accessibility in from the start, it's almost impossible to retrofit. Very few systems manage to add high-quality accessibility later on.

You should design it is not necessary to implement from the beginning.

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

#146

Post by jessriedel »

sampo wrote: post #130
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?

I'm also curious. As always for the arXiv there is latex source code for the paper available at the "Other formats" link, and I'm having a hard time telling if its been auto-generated from Nota, but I presume it has given the visual similarity.

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

#147

Post by cscheid »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #82
dash2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the similarities and differences between it and quarto?

I used typst for some university project and what I really liked about it is that it is as programmable as latex but with a language that's much more intuitive (no macro weirdness, but actual functions/if/loops etc etc). It feels like a better of TeX rather than a different way of writing documents. I haven't really used quarto so take this with a grain of salt, but from what I can see it is much more declarative, yo…

(disclosure: I'm a quarto dev. But I'm also a big fan of typst)

You're right that typst is _very good_ at extensions, and likely will always be superior to quarto when it comes to that. The fundamental advantage typst has is that it's a "greenfield" project, and a very well-designed one at that, especially when compared to TeX.

> Looks like there are extensions that can be programmed, but they are more like second class citizens that you are not suppose to use normally.

We take quarto extensibility pretty seriously! "Simple" customization is available without need to program extensions, mostly through metadata configuration and classes and attributes in the document. This covers the basics like CSS, layout, document listings, etc.

For slightly more sophisticated extensions, you can create "filters" that operate directly on the document AST, either using the built-in Lua extension API or reading/writing a JSON representation (these are both built on top of Pandoc's capabilities, which quarto leverages extensively).

For reusable, packageable functionality, the extension system as it exists today is simple but certainly meant to be used "normally". It's how custom formats (the common, concrete use case is to provide different styles for particular academic journals) are defined and used.

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

#148

Post by SebRollen »

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

The Common Paper app[1], though not quite a git workflow, has always struck me as being pretty close to how an software engineer might approach contracts:

1. An immutable set of standard terms, with variable references.

2. A collection of cover page variables, that modify the standard terms by reference.

3. A structured negotiation workflow, where users "propose changes" to the cover page variables with automatic "diff-ing" (redlining).

It's not a product targeted to software engineers, but has always appealed to me as a way to sneak in some engineering best-practices into the world of lawyering :)

Full disclosure: I'm an employee

[1]: https://commonpaper.com/product/

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

#150

Post by jimbokun »

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 ;)

To me, that just calls for a sensible UI with attractive styling and interaction over a git backend for the heavy lifting of tracking changes through time.

A lot of successful products have been built in this way. I've seen developers get upset with Apple for making successful products out of just giving a nice UI to a piece of open source tech that does the heavy lifting. Like it's cheating.

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