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The future of education is plain text

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Re: The future of education is plain text

#291

Post by TuringTest »

emodendroket wrote: post #230
TuringTest wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other standards, and web standards in particular, tend to have several open source implementations to guarantee that it's possible to build tools that support it without being the reference implementation. OOXML has no such thing, and the reference implementation is closed source, so it's basically impossible to replicate in any practical sense.

There aren't several implementations of Office Open XML formats in open source projects? I don't think that's accurate.

Not fully compatible with PowerPoint, no. That's why I said the PowerPoint format is proprietary; it's impossible to build a working interoperable tool, because either parts of its format remain secret and do not follow the published standard, or the format itself makes references to hidden implementation details.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#292

Post by tincholio »

mrweasel wrote: post #204
FabHK wrote: post #175

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.

If anything, the "track changes" feature in Word is actually nicer than diffing by hand (and this is coming from someone who positively hates Word!).

Re: The future of education is plain text

#293

Post by vesak »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #111
vesak wrote: post #109

I recently wrote a book using Libreoffice and Microsoft Word, because the publisher demanded it. The process took about a year. My own estimate is that we lost about 2-3 months to tool-related problems, without any benefit whatsoever. I have never in my 20 year career understood the point of word-processing tools, and never will. And those tools make money. That is wrong.

Would you have had tool problems if you had just went with Word?

Yes.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#294

Post by yellowapple »

The only downside I can think of here is that plain-text-only documents tend to defer images/figures and other non-plain-text media to external files (if they even support such media in the first place). This means that these additional files (and their formats) need to be considered as well.

After all, not all of us are able to learn by just reading a bunch of text. Some of us need graphical (possibly video) or even interactive material as well. Such material is at high risk of being lost (see also: the abundance of interactive science demonstrations online that are implemented as Java or Flash applets).

Re: The future of education is plain text

#295

Post by ReverseCold »

polygot wrote: post #228

While plain text is compatible with virtually 100% of every OS ever, when I try to open a txt file on my windows machine it asks what application to open it in, since there are no default apps (Windows 7 and earlier.) This might make it appear that plain text files are a "special" format because it doesn't open up when you double click on it. I have sent plain text files to some of my colleagues in the past (so that…

I'm pretty sure .txt opens in notepad..?

Re: The future of education is plain text

#296

Post by Razengan »

NoahTheDuke wrote: post #278
Razengan wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plaintext / basic Markdown with an "organizer" like Ulysses [0] or Quiver [1] can serve just about all needs. [0] https://www.ulyssesapp.com [1] http://happenapps.com/#quiver

No Windows or Linux? Okay.

Ulysses (and probably Quiver too) can just give you a "pretty view" of your existing folder structure, and since it's all plaintext/MD you can work with your data on Windows/Linux just fine, and there's nothing keeping someone from makes similar apps on the other OSes.

I used to use OneNote for everything, until I moved to Macs... Not only there was no Mac version at first, OneNote STILL doesn't let you import old local notebooks into the Mac version.

With Ulysses/Quiver at least I know that what I write on the Mac will still be readable on Windows/Linux..

Re: The future of education is plain text

#297

Post by coldtea »

overdunk wrote: post #269
coldtea wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean compared to structured file formats like JSON, YAML, TOML, XML and whatever (including binary such). Obviously it's not harder to parse than a PDF.

Uh, " plain text " is not a pair of words that I would use to describe " structured data " at all. I don't even know what someone would intend to mean in such a situation. If someone told me they needed me to parse a "plain text" file, to me it sounds like they'd want me to provide some statistics on an unstructured text blob. Free form text does have properties, such as byte length, character count, word count, line…

>Uh, "plain text" is not a pair of words that I would use to describe "structured data" at all. I don't even know what someone would intend to mean in such a situation.

Well, most would agree markdown is a plain text format for example, but it's not totally unstructured.

Still it's a bitch to parse compared to something like JSON.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#298

Post by vog »

kbenson wrote: post #200
fao_ wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act as if AsciiDoc is difficult to learn. It seems mostly equivalent to Markdown, just nicer in a lot of small ways

AsciiDoc is much more complex, in that it supports many more things. Check out the user guide[1]. Markdown takes a couple paragraphs to describe. You can know everything there is to know about using markdown within a couple minutes at most. 1: http://asciidoc.org/userguide.html

Isn't that comparison unfair, given that AsciiDoc gives you more functionality in a curated whole?

Nobody forces you do use all of them. If you just want to use AsciiDoc as "Markdown with more coherent syntax", stick to a small subset that is equally trivial to learn.

And if you need more, AsciiDoc's comprehensive user guide is a huge advantage. In Markdown, you'll have to look around for all kinds of forks. And god forbid if you want to use two additional features that were not designed to work together in the first place. Compare this with AsciiDoc's clear extension system where you can hook up everything and it won't interfere with each other.

Re: The future of education is plain text

#299

Post by accordionclown »

dredmorbius wrote: post #267
gech wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you stating that there are people that like pdfs?

Given a sufficient device it's actually a fairly decent format. The problem is that that device has to relatively closely correspond to printed paper sizes, within a factor of about 75% - 125%. What PDF offers is a consistent, space-persistent, formatted output. For reading longer works, it actually does matter to me where a passage appears on a page, or within a work. Spatial memory is important that way. I read a l…

dr. ed said:

> If I'm extracting content from works, I prefer source (LaTeX, Markdown, DocBook, etc.). Though that's another story.

except it's not actually another story. it's just a different part of the same story. and a format (like .pdf) which only handles one part of the story well (such as reading) but falls apart on another part (like text reuse) is not -- ultimately -- a good solution.

but that doesn't mean .pdf is worthless. yes, it's worthless as an archival format, and as a distribution format. (and those two are the ones which people commonly pitch as _strengths_ of .pdf, unfortunately, which is misguided.)

but .pdf is fine as a one-off output-format, spun out in an on-demand fashion by an end-user who wants .pdf for their own personal reasons (which require no justification to us). this is what you mention at the end of your comment, and i, too, am working on that...

Re: The future of education is plain text

#300

Post by [deleted] »

accordionclown wrote: post #299
dredmorbius wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a sufficient device it's actually a fairly decent format. The problem is that that device has to relatively closely correspond to printed paper sizes, within a factor of about 75% - 125%. What PDF offers is a consistent, space-persistent, formatted output. For reading longer works, it actually does matter to me where a passage appears on a page, or within a work. Spatial memory is important that way. I read a l…

dr. ed said: > If I'm extracting content from works, I prefer source (LaTeX, Markdown, DocBook, etc.). Though that's another story. except it's not actually another story. it's just a different part of the same story. and a format (like .pdf) which only handles one part of the story well (such as reading) but falls apart on another part (like text reuse) is not -- ultimately -- a good solution. but that doesn't mean…

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