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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

#171

Post by ska »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #168
ska wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know the names. They all seem to have the pro Acrobat stuff, but more often use something also bundled with search tools perhaps? Communication between lawyers on opposite "sides" often seems to be by PDF, not source (although sometimes that too) so I imagined they both have working docs kept separate because they don't want to to share some of the markup/comments. I asked one of them about that they claimed that using clean pdf output (no metadata or history) was worth the extra hassle as it avoided costly errors.

Anyway that's my limited experience having dealt with a bunch of them - no expert.

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

#172

Post by miniBill »

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-…

I really don't like Nota, but you get my upvote because: 1. Typst is amazing and 2. you are open to criticism and are looking to redesign it, and I am hopeful you'll create something good

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

#173

Post by tikhonj »

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, just like you could do in Markdown. You can use inline TeX and get the right overall format with a template. I haven't actually done this for a paper, but I used Pandoc to typeset a textbook with lots of math and code and it worked well. We could have used org-mode just as easily, but Markdown was already familiar to my non-Emacs-using coauthor. (Hey, we all have our faults!)

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

#175

Post by jacobolus »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #119
xeyownt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that your goals and skills don't match the purpose and capabilities of the tool, not that the tool is insufficiently "intuitive".

Manuscript composition used to be: write your document by hand or with a typewriter, handwrite some notes in the margin, throw in some pages with your figures on them, then let a professional typesetter take care of all of the technical details of making a typeset document for printed output. This was a whole separate career, and the typesetter would sink almost as much time into making your document look pretty as you put into writing it.

If you are using LaTeX, you are taking on the role of the professional typesetter yourself, and you need to make some specific technical choices to get some output from it. This can be a problem if you are inexperienced and don't know which choices to make or in a hurry and don't want to make any choices, but is also good insofar as it lets you actually produce a professional quality document if you have the time and expertise to do so. The difficulty involved is at least an order of magnitude less than doing composition of metal type.

If you are using markdown (or whatever), you are just punting on having a professional document at the end, and/or letting a system make all of the choices for you (often badly), or perhaps expecting to still hand off your document to a professional at the end for proper typesetting.

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

#176

Post by rawgabbit »

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

I have never used it but it seems lawyers wants something like Clio which not only does manage documents but runs their entire business.

https://www.clio.com/lawyaw/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_(software_company)

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

#177

Post by dash2 »

ska wrote: post #158
dash2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are comparing apples and oranges, at least a bit. The latex equivalent is \documentclass{article} \title{Natural selection in the Health and Retirement Study} \author{XXX} \date{\today} \begin{document} \begin{abstract} I investigate natural selection on polygenic scores in the contemporary US, using the Health and Retirement Study. Results partially support the economic theory of fertility as an explanation for…

It's absolutely true that you may need to customize things. And then you are stuck with the big quarto disadvantage: debugging a toolchain that typically looks like

    quarto -> knitr -> markdown -> pandoc -> [tex -> pdf | html]
and not knowing exactly where the error came from.

At the same time, the markdown defaults produce a nice, readable paper. The TeX defaults get you something that reminds you of Rubik's Cube and Duran Duran.

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

#178

Post by dash2 »

mr_mitm wrote: post #83
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…

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…

Thanks for the help and I can feel the enthusiasm. I have to tell you, my hatred for TeX is profound and goes far beyond this one point. But if I start ranting, I'll never stop.

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

#179

Post by dash2 »

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.

> with tools like ChatGPT it's even easier to write TeX documents.

I am not quite sure whether this is satire?

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

#180

Post by laurmaedje »

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.

I'm one of the Typst devs and I do agree with you here. LaTeX has a lot of trouble with accessibility because it's hard to retain semantic information through layers of macros. However, I think we are in a better starting position because Typst is designed to revolve around semantic elements that the compiler can actually understand. We haven't gotten to it yet (there's lots to do), but we want to use this information both to output Tagged PDFs and for semantic HTML export. I guess we'll see how it turns out!
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