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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 i
by voidhorse 9y ago
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 into other formats and deliciously human readable are the way to go.
- pyre 9y agoPDFs are still ok though. There are many implementations of PDF parsers, many Open Source. It may not be as "universal" as plain-text, but it is definitely universal. At this point, I believe that all major operating systems ship with the ability to open PDFs for display.
- syndev 9y agoI agree that PDF is effectively universal as a distribution format for graphical and formatted text. There are some cases where plain text is still nicer, like when trying to read documentation without an X server.
- rsync 9y ago"PDFs are still ok though." They are OK in theory, for the reasons you state. The problem is the gratuitous use of PDF which we have all experienced - here's a common (pathological) example: Document author starts with plain text - no special formatting or fonts, no images, etc. Somehow their toolchain converts that into a PDF file that contains No text, but rather an image of text. The result is a big, bloated, unnecessary use of PDF that cannot even be parsed or used with anything but a graphical PDF viewer since the text is now gone - there is nothing but a picture. Of text.
- canes123456 9y agoA PDF without text still kind of works. It not accessible which is a big problem. However, this happens when there is a mistake somewhere in the chain. This is all too common, but what is the correct way to handle tables, diagrams, formulas, images, graphs, links in plain text. There is no right way to do these things in plain text. You will eventually need html or pdf for education.
- gkya 9y agoAlso: PDFs have pages and thus page numbers, which are an important tool. When working with long texts you need reference points to share your state.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoThat's what hyperlinks are. They even have the better property that they don't break if you change the font size for the whole text.
- gkya 9y agoThey don't mean much in a classroom of say 30 or 40. A lecturer will have n people with n texts and will have to synchronise them. In a typical lesson you jump to different pages also non-sequentially. The best option is a PDF etc. that you can optionally print. Anything else is a recipe for chaos, especially if you're not in a CS classroom.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 9y agoPDFs seem to render poorly on ebook readers.
- ghaff 9y agoebook readers yes. But they can work quite well on full-size tablets. Kindles etc. are great when you're mostly reading a flow of text. For anything that benefits from design layout -- positioned graphics, sidebars, footnotes, etc. PDF on a 10" tablet is often better.
- leggomylibro 9y agoIdeally you'd provide a PDF as the most convenient format, but have a latex or similar root file that could be processed into other formats, like maybe .mobi or .epub.
- Jaruzel 9y agoMainly because the layout code (Postscript?) in the PDF file assumes an A4 or US letter sized page. Most PDFs just cannot handle being reflowed.
- pyre 9y ago> Mainly because the layout code (Postscript?) in the PDF file assumes an A4 or US letter sized page Technically, it could be anything. The layout is specified, and everything stems from this.
- gumby 9y agoPDFs presume that the writer has "control" rather than the reader. Actually I probably shouldn't put quotes around "control" -- formatting is rigidly constrained, on purpose. In addition PDF adapts, by design, a model of paper to the web. It's a "horseless carriage" file format. Font size, page width, cut/paste and presentation in general should be the reader's choice, not the writer's. The Web manages this, sort of. The OP is right on in this regard. Even the TeXs of this world, while better than the binary formats, have upgrade complexity.
- ghaff 9y ago>should be the reader's choice, not the writer's Sometimes. There are a lot more design options available if the creator of the content maintains control over layout, fonts, etc. Sometimes this doesn't matter--if it's a block of text for example. Fairly simple layouts also render pretty well on the web. Different content works better or worse with different approaches. One isn't intrinsically superior.
- pyre 9y agoOn the other hand, how does one write a standard invoice or a tax form using only plain-text / markdown? Formats with control over the layout have their place.
- prawn 9y agoMaybe not just writer/reader, but also a presenter. In the context of education, a teacher will often be using someone else's material but presenting in their own style.
- CJefferson 9y agoPDFs are awful for the blind, most PDFs are very painful to extract text from.
- ianamartin 9y agoPDFs are awful. Could have stopped right there.
- jswny 9y agoAre they? I can't even copy text from a PDF without the new lines and indentation getting completely messed up never mind the rest of the formatting...
- ska 9y agoPDF is a terminal format.
- slaymaker1907 9y agoEven Pandoc gives up on trying to read it. To be fair, though, I think that the office suite file formats are even worse.
- jimjimjim 9y agoI have done a lot of work with code for handling pdfs. The spec is 1000+ pages, references other docs, has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate
- accordionclown 9y agopshaw. right now, today, tuesday june 13th, 2017, safari will not open a .pdf to a specific page or bookmark, neither on the desktop nor in ios. chrome can. firefox can. but safari cannot. which means neither the iphone nor the ipad can do it. imagine if -- on the web -- you couldn't deep-link to an anchor in the middle of a webpage, but merely to (the top of) the webpage itself. that's not the only deficiency of the .pdf format. it's not even the most galling one. it's just the one that happens to be hamstringing a certain project of mine at the moment. and it's illustrative.
- vog 9y ago> 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. AsciiDoc is a well-designed language with a stable definition for years. (Compare this to Markdown: Are you using the original Markdown? Or a fork of some fork of Markdown?) Also, AsciiDoc can be converted to beautiful HTML as well as beautiful PDF. Also, the clean definition of AsciiDoc means you have no trouble with nesting. For example, in a table cell you can put everything: enumerations, code listings, and so on. You can even put a new table within a table cell if you need to. LaTeX is the de-facto standard in mathematics and parts of computer science, and has proven to be a stable standard, too. For example, arXiv doesn't accept your generated PDF as black-box, they want your LaTeX source and generate the PDF themselves. (That way, they can, for example, automatically produce PDFs with hyperlinks from documents which originally had no hyperlinks.) The downside is, of course, that LaTeX is not as readable as a plaintext-like format. So for any "serious" / rigorous documentation purposes, either AsciiDoc, MediaWiki or LaTeX are the way to go.
- sharpercoder 9y agoAsciiDoc has a serious adoption problem compared to MarkDown.
- vog 9y agoWhy 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.
- kbenson 9y ago> Given the comparatively low quality of Markdown (as a language) Markdown stresses ease of readability. I don't find the language low quality at all, just limited. Limited isn't necessarily bad, depending on its purpose. > isn't GitHub the only reason why Markdown gets pushed so much? Reddit's use seems to significantly predate Github, and I would say reaches a far greater audience. Unique users visiting in April 2017 is 1.285 billion[1]. Some fraction of that is probably unique people (given anonymous desktop and mobile usage), but given how large the number is, I imagine it's still a very large number. > If GitHub chose AsciiDoc instead of Markdown as their base, we would be in a better position now. I agree that Github would be in a better place now, but I don't think that would really have changed anything for anyone else. Even if you want to make a case that Github would have influenced programmers who would have then used it in other projects, I think you need to account for Stack Overflow also. I think it was arguably much more popular and used by a far wider audience than Github for a long time (and may still be, I'm not sure). Markdown was used widely because it was simple, and users would actually bother to learn and remember the very few options they had. People are more used to it now, and at this point, sure, they might accept something more complex (especially if it built on the rules they already internalized), but I don't think we can blindly assume they would have accepted something more complex. 1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/reddit-monthly-visitors/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/reddit-monthly-vi... Edit: s/Unique IPs/Unique users/