Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nota-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 217 posts

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

#161

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

LaTeX definitely has many messy parts that need to be cleaned up. Native support for unicode characters and bidi text (which is somewhat implemented by xetex), is mandatory in new-latex.

TeX engine obviously will need to be rewritten completely from scratch for the reasons you suggest.

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

#162

Post by esafak »

horsh1 wrote: post #152
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-…

It would be interesting to see if Nota could solve one problem that TeX and LaTeX, while theoretically capable, don't really solve in practice. Namely, the ease of styling according to dumb external requirements. Just to give you several examples: * Very tight, but very loaded layouts like A0 conference posters * Apply a national standard, such as, for example, post-Soviet GOST documentation styling standards * All c…

Templates are one reason products like Notion took off: they simplify the product, and build community at the same time.

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

#163

Post by esafak »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #88
esquivalience wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think markdown might be the solution here.

We used to have word processors that exposed mark up. I wrote immense amounts of documentation in Wordstar on 8 bit machines and it was definitely more efficient than the WYSIWYG word processors that came later and faster even when the newer ones were running on much faster hardware. Something like Wordstar would be better than MarkDown.

WordPerfect called it Reveal Codes.

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

#164

Post by ska »

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…

Again, apples and oranges. Yes it's more markup than e.g. markdown (which is fundamentally less capable) But how do you do the equivalent ot the [t] and \centering in the former on a per figure bases? what about scaling it differently from other figures in your doc, or embedding a reference in caption with a particular style?

For that matter your equivalent is still one line, it's just \includegraphics{path}. The figure environment is just adding extra capabilities.

I agree not everyone needs to do this, but the trade offs you are illustrating are not "X is better than Y" so much as "X is simpler than Y, and can't do as many things"

For you that trade-off makes sense, great. But I wouldn't generalized it to the value of the tool. I know plenty of academics who are quite proficient at Tex, let alone the simpler Latex, and find it lets them generate the content they want easily enough, given it's power.

This isn't just mathematicians either, though most of the people I know using it came to that out of a need to do math typesetting properly. How would you for example generate a mixed language document with both left-to-right and right-to-left languages formatted correctly?

LaTeX's real problem isn't the syntactic load (easily handled with a decent editor) it's the package system. It can be abused to e.g. generate conference posters well, but it's hairy once you get into the details.

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

#165

Post by esafak »

maegul wrote: post #35

Can’t help but contrast it to ObservableHQ ( https://observablehq.com/ ), which is basically front end notebooks with reactivity and other niceties. Leans right into “dynamism” while also allowing for simple document authoring. Though it’s a platform, there’s a runtime and some open substitutes for the bits not open IIRC.

He mentions it in section 4 of https://willcrichton.net/nota/

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

#166

Post by esafak »

mppowers wrote: post #22

I would be interested in a comparison between this and Jupyter notebooks. Notebooks seem like they'd be easier to use than a specific language for most users.

Mentioned in passing of section 4: https://willcrichton.net/nota/

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

#167

Post by kyawzazaw »

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-…

Not superrelated but having a resume layout in Nota will drive adoption with high velocity

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

#168

Post by kyawzazaw »

ska wrote: post #156
celim307 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The standard for legal docs is to redline changes with an additional tool, because you don't necessarily trust the other contributors. They have decent tools for this, and the system works ok I suppose. Editing tends to be in tic-toc fashion anyways so I guess it works. You could do someting like this with git and a markup language, but I don't know you'd convince many lawyers that the squeeze was worth the juice.

What are the tools you mentioned here? Is there like a dominant software, similar to ArcGIS for GIS?

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

#169

Post by ska »

FireBeyond wrote: post #154
nine_k wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can write doctorate level academic papers in Org Mode?

You can, but you might be better off just using AUCTex if you are emacs anyway.

YMMV with use case, obviously.

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

#170

Post by esafak »

agileAlligator wrote: post #53

Reminiscent of Gwern's website[0] (click on any one of the articles to see what I am talking about). Was that an inspiration in creating this? [0]: https://www.gwern.net/index

Good catch! It also reminds me of Apple Hypercards and Xerox NoteCards.
Post reply on HN