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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

#41

Post by lallysingh »

jxf wrote: post #4

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…

Check out the example of the PLDI paper. There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help.

I think that there's interesting open space for dynamic documents, but you need some good examples of people using it with taste.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

wodenokoto wrote: post #40
jxf wrote: post #4

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…

So you want static margins that not even adjust to mobile?

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by auggierose »

I like the idea! So basically, a better and modern LaTeX. I've had the same idea for a while now, for example the ability to reference definitions, etc.

But I think Nota goes about this a bit too heavy-handed:

    % let nota = @Smallcaps{**Nota**}
    .@Definition[name: "nota", label: nota]{
      #nota is a language for writing documents, like academic papers and blog posts.
    }
That's 4 mentions of `nota` to introduce a definition, 5 if we count `Nota` as well. Come on. Also, when referencing, instead of `&nota` maybe just allow `[[Nota]]` and `[[nota]]` instead?

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

#44

Post by jskherman »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #28

I was just thinking about what the easiest way would be to create a blog with mostly static content but with room for interactive graphs or arbitrary customization if i want it. Is this a good option? Another option I saw was Quarto [1]. Maybe even a simple static site blog like Jekyll can be used as well where i just edit the output HTML as needed? What do you all recommend? [1] https://quarto.org/

You could also go down the route of using shortcodes in Hugo (I think there is something similar as well for Jekyll?) and use the output HTML file as the input for a shortcode from data visualization libraries such as Vega-Altair (Python) or plotly.

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

#46

Post by wcrichton »

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-engineering-lab/doclang-benchma...

I still very much believe in the high-level philosophy, but Nota will look very different within ~6 months. In the meantime, the single coolest development in the document language space is Typst, which I encourage you to check out: https://typst.app/

Also: the next version of Nota will be written 99% in Rust :-)

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

#47

Post by eviks »

jxf wrote: post #4

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…

If it's not needed, it's not essential

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

#48

Post by jacobolus »

lallysingh wrote: post #41
jxf wrote: post #4

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it…

Check out the example of the PLDI paper. There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help. I think that there's interesting open space for dynamic documents, but you need some good examples of people using it with taste.

You mean this one? https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/

One unfortunate problem is that nobody bothered setting the measure for legibility. On my display the text block is far far too wide. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length (while we're talking about typography, the fonts for body copy and code are mismatched in size in a distracting way)

As far as formulas/notation is concerned, the notation used in this paper is targeted only at experts in theoretical computer science, approximately the level of advanced grad students or above, who also happen to be pretty familiar with Rust and C++. The gimmicky popups are probably not meaningfully helpful for such an audience, and in my opinion don't really make the notation any more accessible to people without the extremely steep prerequisite expertise (e.g. I don't think this paper is going to be at all accessible to the vast majority of working programmers or computer science undergraduate students).

If you really want to make the paper more accessible, it would be better to focus on reducing the reliance on formulas, reducing the amount of jargon involved, and explaining the concepts and techniques using plain English targeted at a broader audience, rather than trying to add extra colors, click targets, or popups. (A research paper may alternately want to just target experts; that can also be fine. Even for experts this paper is pretty dense though.)

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

#49

Post by shepherdjerred »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #28

I was just thinking about what the easiest way would be to create a blog with mostly static content but with room for interactive graphs or arbitrary customization if i want it. Is this a good option? Another option I saw was Quarto [1]. Maybe even a simple static site blog like Jekyll can be used as well where i just edit the output HTML as needed? What do you all recommend? [1] https://quarto.org/

I would very highly recommend Astro [0]. Astro lets you write React-style components that compile to plain HTML/CSS (unless you _actually_ need JavaScript). My personal site and blog [1] is built with Astro

Here's their tutorial on building a blog with Astro: https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/

[0]: https://astro.build/

[1]: https://sjer.red/ source at https://github.com/shepherdjerred/shepherdjerred.com

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

#50

Post by FridgeSeal »

> A &nota document compiles to a JavaScript program, meaning it's easy to:

> * View documents on any device that has a web browser.

Ah yes, a JS runtime and a browser, 2 things which are feasible to develop and definitely not massive black boxes.

I love the idea.

I just think it would be better being a format unto itself, or at least not requiring JS and/or a browser. Decoupling from these at least permits other language implementations of viewers/editors; browsers are already basically unimplementable by anyone without massive commercial backing.

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