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Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

blog.miris.design

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Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#81

Post by logifail »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #56

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you…

> Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you want to view those same photos when you're fifty years old, or seventy-five, you're better off storing them as a JPEG than a PSD, and you're better off storing them on a hard drive you have access to in addition to whatever cloud they're currently occupying.

OTOH there are many photos I have, taken a decade or two ago, where I wish I'd written down my thoughts and reactions at the time, rather than just taken the picture. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but just having lots of pictures and no contemporaneous words, leaves more of a gap the longer ago it was.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#82

Post by happyglands »

I've struggled with this for quite some time now, and tried almost every tool out there. At the moment, I'm settling with Bear, writing my notes in Markdown. I prefer the ease of using nvAlt but I need the ability to store images and PDFs and I like the fact that it has some very nice export options should I eventually move to another tool, so I don't feel like I'm "locked in".

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#83

Post by necovek »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #56

This argument feels ... not quite like a strawman, but more pedantic than I think it needs to be. I don't think anyone really argues that everything should be plain text, even if that's an easy shorthand. The real argument is "use the simplest, most open format possible." Nobody is suggesting you go through all of your photos, transcribe your emotional reaction to each picture, and then delete the image. But, if you…

I took the original article on plain text to mean that you should aim for plain text formats which are human-readable even without specific tools to process them.

Thus HTML, Markdown and LaTeX make sense:

  \begin{document}
  Blah
  ...
Is completely understandable to a reader even 50 years down the line, even if they don't have LaTeX on-hand.

But, it does bring an interesting counter-point: what does $$\frac{1}{n}$$ mean (to not even bring up more complex examples). It's probably no surprise that LaTeX is the lingua franca of math input because it brings in terseness, simplicity and some readability to plain text. Still, it's a programming language, so literally all bets are off in a document (you can redefine \frac to mean something else entirely).

I guess both articles, as noted elsewhere, attempt to nail down one familiar truth: use the simplest expression possible, but not simpler. One thinks that's always plain-text except for images, but there are just more contexts where this applies.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#84

Post by mro_name »

b112 wrote: post #71
mro_name wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one will understand that's a bit harsh. And frankly, I don't understand 100% english either, but still we use it to communicate.

The point isn't that you can learn it, but instead, having to learn it by examining it in depth, always wondering if there are things not used yet (does the doc you look at, only show part of the standard in its formatting? Imagine a doc not using a tag, but the tag is in other docs...), and then, writing code to covert it. Standards exist for a reason. We already have issues with people not understanding specs, and…

my favourite is the spec that was changed after the fact:

Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339#section-5.6

But what harm does it to restrict oneself to a few html tags?

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#85

Post by briandoll »

I assume this is a response to Derek Sivers post: Write Plain Text Files https://sive.rs/plaintext

I've been using computers daily for about 35 years now and I have a _lot_ of plain text files that I regularly use -- notes, lists, outlines, quotes, links, etc. Does anyone who has been around a while, have a large multi-decade collection of texts that are _not_ plain text? What formats do you use? How do you maintain access to those files over time?

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#86

Post by davbryn1 »

"Prioritising the longevity of data can sacrifice the authenticity of what it tries to capture and preserve. When I say authenticity, I refer to how accurate and detailed the data in question preserves a particular state. An original raw image, for example, will capture a landscape much more authentically than written text would. Written text will inevitably comprise of ambiguity and even bias, if not distortion."

Or, you need to become a better writer.

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#88

Post by falcolas »

coldtea wrote: post #79
falcolas wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E.g. if it's a single stereo wav file render, it would miss all the individual channels, for starters. A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author…

> A DAW session is like notes for writing a book. Not everything is going to make it in, and the choice of what does make it from the notes to the book, and how it's changed, is quite intentional. And I, personally, don't consider a book to be "lossy" or "unauthentic" because it doesn't also come with all the author's notes. Yeah, not really. In music, for starters, a DAW session is like the recording reels from the…

Perhaps this is a protools vs. Reaper thing, but none of that is ever lost in Reaper. So long as I don't get rid of the directory, I will not lose any of that. And, if we're talking about the producer, creating the final mix doesn't lose any of the authenticity of their session.

I'm probably missing something, but between wav files and the metadata (which is, IIRC, marked up text files in Reaper), the producer will never lose anything.

EDIT: Confirmed, .rpp files (and most of the plugins) are text files. So, best of both worlds - longevity AND authenticity (and infinite undo).

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#89

Post by necovek »

mxuribe wrote: post #38
dade_ wrote: post #17

MD for all things text and SVG journals for handwritten notes, diagrams, sketches, screenshots. Works great, but haven’t found a way to integrate them beyond using a common set of folders.

> ...SVG journals for handwritten... Would you kindly clarify this? Did you mean scan in handwritten material but save it in a scalable image format like SVG? I'm quite interested but maybe i'm not capturing what you mean here, because i have not had my breakfast. :-)

Not GP and I have no idea if they meant this, but "smart" vectorization/tracing would be ideal when use of touchscreen pens is impossible (still doesn't capture the angle a pen is being held at, but we are getting close).

For the state of the art, look up "image tracing".

Re: Don't write just in plain text (longevity vs. authenticity)

#90

Post by writegit »

Or both?

I have a daemon that watches for binary changes in writing documents.

If changes are identified then it runs:

    $ libreoffice --headless --convert-to txt
Then commits the plaintext to a git repo.

Allows for diffs, text search, and "longevity" across "authentic" docs.

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