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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

#51

Post by jessriedel »

maple3142 wrote: post #30
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…

I think some basic dynamism is still necessary to make reading pdf on small screens comfortable (e.g. mobile). When on mobile, I vastly prefer reading webpages over pdf because most reasonable webpage should be able to fit mobile screen.

All you need is re-flowable text for this, right? That's generally not considered dynamic.

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

#52

Post by function_seven »

anon35 wrote: post #26
DistractionRect wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more. Dynamism is great for web _apps_, but it's the last thing I want in a document

OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications? There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page). But they are, universally: dynamic. Ex…

When I was a kid, we called it "multimedia". Encarta being the example that comes to mind. My school library had some other interactive encyclopedia that came on a 6–CD-ROM magazine changer (the Pioneer style, if you remember music CD changers). I remember being absolutely flabbergasted at the sheer amount of megabytes sitting in that unassuming disc magazine.

That term is really quaint these days, and it doesn't fully capture what you're talking about. IIRC, it was more prepackaged animations, photos, video, and music; rather than "dynamic code running on paper"

"Dynagraph"? Sorry, that's lame, but there's my entry.

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

#54

Post by Calavar »

jessriedel wrote: post #51
maple3142 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some basic dynamism is still necessary to make reading pdf on small screens comfortable (e.g. mobile). When on mobile, I vastly prefer reading webpages over pdf because most reasonable webpage should be able to fit mobile screen.

All you need is re-flowable text for this, right? That's generally not considered dynamic.

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.

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

#55

Post by bow_ »

kimi wrote: post #39

Why do we need a language that creates a text page by compiling to JS? the same set of goals are handled by AsciiDoc. Real publishers (eg Oreilly) use AsciiDoc as their input format to create books and websites.

I can second AsciiDoc. It hits the sweet spot between Markdown (arguably more suited for short-ish content) and LaTeX (full-blown academic papers with citations, formulas, etc.).

Have been using AsciiDoc for the past few years and loving it, only falling back to Markdown on places where AsciiDoc is not (yet?) available. GitHub and GitLab, for example, supports rendering AsciiDoc. PyPI unfortunately has not supported it, but more seem to be looking into it [1], which is great.

--- [1] https://github.com/pypa/readme_renderer/issues/205

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

#56

Post by romwell »

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.

>There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help.

That can also really mess with screen readers and other accessibility features.

There's a reason PDF/A spec forbids scripts in any PDF documents that are expected to be available in the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

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

#57

Post by manxman »

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-…

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 often things I wanted to do consistently in Word etc. that have never been easy.

Styles can easily become a muddle. Having consistent numbering and bulleting is a pain and errors can easily creep in.

Tracking changes becomes a real problem when you get into many revisions and that often always ends up relying on a level of trust between parties to not override the tracking. I think there’s a killer app in just fixing this issue with a product that guarantees that guarantees all changes are properly shown from the start of a process to it being fully approved by all parties. Businesses, lawyers etc would love that stuff. Heck if you sprinkle blockchain in you might even get easy funding but I think it’s more of a basic cryptography thing than a blockchain thing - at least it doesn’t need that level of complexity.

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

#58

Post by romwell »

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…

>I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug.

Yeah.

To author's surprise, Adobe's PDF spec supports JavaScript execution[1]. And interactive 3D graphics [2][3]. Not to mention, audio and video [4].

And "Liquid Mode" for responsive-layout PDF documents [5].

Of course, these "features" were considered bugs by the ISO PDF/A spec (archival, i.e. future-proof), so they were all stripped out [6].

The point being: sometimes a document should be a document.

As for science papers: LaTeX is written by humans, for humans. Custom latex commands and packages allow one to write a plaintext document that is as easily read as the paper it generates.

Which is great for accessibility, among other things.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfyFt3zT5A

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW5-1LVtd9U

[4] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/rich-media.html

[5] https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/what-is-adobe-liquid-mode....

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

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

#59

Post by Uptrenda »

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-…

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

Cringed. ty

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