281–290 of 349 posts
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
Some kind of plain text math notation using numpy expressions would be cool.
As others have mentioned, once you dig into the innards and nuances of plain text representations and formats, things can get hairy. Still, I think the author is correct in that plain text formats are certainly a better base for sharing curricula, and for knowledge production in general, than something proprietary like word docs, pdfs, etc. I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert…
> I think markup languages like markdown which are both fairly easy to convert into other formats and deliciously human readable are the way to go. I believe that MediaWiki, AsciiDoc or LaTeX are particularily well-suited for this purpose. MediaWiki is already widely known and widely used for knowledge accumulation, namely, in Wikipedia. The downside is, of course, that this wiki language has quite some limitations.…
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Why is that? Given the comparatively low quality of Markdown (as a language), isn't GitHub the only reason why Markdown gets pushed so much? If GitHub chose AsciiDoc instead of Markdown as their base, we would be in a better position now.
Markdown is also what RStudio uses for markup of comments in notebooks, so it is very common in the bioinformatics and statistics worlds.
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
This. My wife is a math teacher, and the piss-poor experience of writing mathematical notation outside of MS Word keeps them stuck on Word. As much as she and I love LaTeX's math notation, she can't get her departmentmates onboard with that kind of syntax. They need to maintain notes, guides, tests, quizzes, etc. and basically running a team OneDrive is really the only option because all the alternatives utterly fail…
Nope, because plain-text is incompatible with centuries of mathematical notation.
To be honest, human math notations is a weak type system combined with confusing single letter variables. Some kind of plain text math notation using numpy expressions would be cool.
If math notation is unclear to you, it's only because you spent little time learning and using it. Mathematicians care about clarity even more then you, as they actually do indeed spend large parts of their lives reading and writing math. They are very quick to adopt new notation, if it brings meaningful benefits over the old one -- for example, the commutative diagrams and category theory language is now commonplace in all fields of algebra and topology, because it is much easier to draw a diagram and claim it commutes rather than name all the maps involved and write down all the equalities.
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TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
I've been using LaTeX for about 5 years now. I don't recommend picking up TeX notation for reading maths in plaintext. It's the nicest way to produce nice looking mathematics PDFs or MathJax, if you have a powerful text editor. And after a while, you learn things like "underscore is for subscript" and "^ is for superscript". But the point is, mathematics written as a plaintext document needs an interpreter, unless yo…
I'd buy mobile app any LaTeX OCR software.
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TeX users would like a word. Of course, that requires learning TeX notation for those reading it without an interpreter.
Yeah, go teach a 60-year-old math teacher to use TeX.
This person has obviously never been tasked with reading text files from old mainframes.
May I share a related vignette? I have a kid in middle school, and he has a tablet. These things are often pushed as "educational". Pop quiz: you walk by, and you need to determine, within a couple of seconds, if what he's doing is actually educational. Here's what you see: lots of graphics, whizzing around the screen -or- black alphanumeric characters against a white background Now, you don't actually know , but gen…
Or the student could be a visual learner.
One advantage of plain text formats that I haven't seen mentioned is that they're easily and meaningfully diff-able. You can run two versions of a markdown file or a LaTeX source file through a diff, and see what's been changed. Try that with a PDF or Word file or what have you. As I like to keep my files in version control, I use plain text formats as much as possible.
People look at you like your a damn wizard when you diff two texts to find the differences. I'm sure there are diff tools for Word as well, but almost no one use them, because they aren't aware that such a tool could exist. The average person run around with a smart phone in their pocket, a marvel of engineering and yet they still don't know how to use their computer to do trivial tasks.
It's kind of slow though in my experience. Diffing plain text is amazing. I recently used it to diff a research paper I was peer reviewing that the TeX source was provided for. I felt like a wizard.