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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

#201

Post by pseingatl »

ska wrote: post #171
kyawzazaw wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's never pdf. You can't easily make corrections on a pdf, never mind major revisions (such as moving sections around). If someone sends me a pdf I ask for a Word document, or convert the pdf to Word myself. Sending someone a pdf is a little like saying "fuck you."

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

#202

Post by jsunderland323 »

smaudet wrote: post #183
jsunderland323 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100%. It does get interesting when you get into non-plaintext things that have to somehow integrate into plaintext systems (git managed codebases). We've kind of left it up to CMS systems to handle the non-plaintext bits but this leads to many more orthogonal process problems. IMO, I think it really comes down to finding a universal mechanism for diffing and 3-way merging things that aren't plain text (document…

Git is popular because it's linear, and the linear paradigm usually translates well to serial things such as programs, instructions, document sets, etc. It's actually bad at non-linear stuff, which you will have noticed if you have ever been working with hierarchical formats, especially e.g. xml or nested JSON. Word is bad for a whole litany of reasons, but the reason it can't be easily versioned (atop the format bei…

> Sure, we can sort-of reason about this stuff e.g. with a hierarchical css+html+js structure, but without a way to render that I challenge you to be able to simply diff that information. Seeing "bold" or "blue" seems simple enough, as long as you also know to which elements it applies and in what layout. So, suddenly you can't reasonably diff the css file without also difficulty the html.

We’re in complete agreement. But you can do this, you just need to provide a “renderer” and a schema that describes how your tree structure should merge or conflict. If you want to test out a weird version control for structured data, my email is in my bio.

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

#203

Post by Propelloni »

SanderNL wrote: post #199
Propelloni wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for the reply. From what I read, I think you think that language use is some kind of coding with words where you have a deterministic relation between input and output. You seem to treat the semantic content of a statement as if it is somehow static, objective, and oberservable. I don't think it is and I'm in good company on that matter. That being said, that's just my reading of your comment and I could…

Thanks for indulging me. I know I am yelling at the clouds. I also know people usually misunderstand me because I am a “programmer” and all I see is “code”. I guess that’s fair enough, but I fully understand legal being of a completely different nature from Rust. What I also understand is that no matter how long everyone argues about it, the only thing that matters about legal is the text. The font, the styling, etc…

If you are a nitwit, I'm one, too. Don't worry. I think I get your take. You say the important part of legal and scientific texts is their content, not their form. And I agree. But that is not where we started. We started with (paraphrasing) "programmer tools like git are superior to MS Word, therefore lawyers should use git." There, I disagree.

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

#204

Post by SanderNL »

Propelloni wrote: post #203
SanderNL wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for indulging me. I know I am yelling at the clouds. I also know people usually misunderstand me because I am a “programmer” and all I see is “code”. I guess that’s fair enough, but I fully understand legal being of a completely different nature from Rust. What I also understand is that no matter how long everyone argues about it, the only thing that matters about legal is the text. The font, the styling, etc…

If you are a nitwit, I'm one, too. Don't worry. I think I get your take. You say the important part of legal and scientific texts is their content, not their form. And I agree. But that is not where we started. We started with (paraphrasing) "programmer tools like git are superior to MS Word, therefore lawyers should use git." There, I disagree.

Oh, right. I agree as well. Git is not their kind of tool.

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

#205

Post by glompers »

SebRollen wrote: post #148
celim307 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "di…

Nisus Writer Pro [0] has been around for 40 years this year IIRC (IANANWP) and has a user base who can vouch for many of the features that HN readers want something to offer.

[0] https://nisus.com/pro

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

#207

Post by dotancohen »

nine_k wrote: post #120
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-…

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.

Can you add a subheading in an Org mode document, then pop out of that subsection to get back to the previous heading? E.g.:

  * Foobar
  Foobars are great.

  ** Warning
  Foobars are not to be used with Booms.

  Foobars are great for reading, writing, and flying. This text is outside the Warning subsection.

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

#208

Post by Calavar »

jessriedel wrote: post #142
Calavar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, that's what dynamic means in a frontend dev context. This is a typesetting and document layout context.

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

#209

Post by dctoedt »

todd8 wrote: post #140
celim307 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

> legal documents don't have copyright protection

1. That's an overstatement: For "original works of authorship," copyright happens automatically upon "fixation" in a "tangible medium of expression" (e.g., saving to a file, maybe even just typing). [0] And it doesn't take much "original ... authorship" to qualify for copyright protection.

2. Here's A hypothetical example: Alice drafts a contract from scratch as Version 1 and saves it to a file. It's copyrighted; on these facts, Alice owns the copyright. [0] Then Bob takes Alice's Version 1 and modifies it to create Version 1.1: Bob's "original" contributions to Version 1.1 are themselves protected by copyright, which Bob owns, bu with two caveats:

(a) Bob has no claim to copyright in Alice's Version 1; and

(b) Bob's own contributions to Version 1.1 won't be protected unless one or both of the following is true: (1) Bob had Alice's permission to base his "derivative work" on Alice's Version 1; [1] and/or (2) Bob's use of Version 1 qualified as "fair use" (a complicated question in itself). [2]

NOTES:

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101; see also, e.g., https://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyri...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/103

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

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

#210

Post by breuleux »

svnt wrote: post #190
breuleux wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want another data point, I made my own markup language a while back that aims for markdown-like simplicity while making it easy to define simple macros and operators: http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/ It's pretty extensive. I still use it for my own writing, although I'm probably the only one.

Do you have an example of a document where it’s special features are more heavily used? Most of the posts I saw were basically just paragraphs and italicized sections.

I don't have a whole lot that are public. This section describes one of advanced features I use most: http://breuleux.github.io/quaint/syntax.html#rules

I've used it to create operators for stuff like:

* Lead caps

* Formatting dialogue in a screenplay

* Marking something that's a prop in a screenplay

* Parametric links (e.g. defining @john so that it creates a link to the john handle on X/Twitter)

* Tooltips

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