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Your doubts are well-founded if you intend to use the project as a further dependency for other projects. Arabica is intended to provide a kind of early interim

Your doubts are well-founded if you intend to use the project as a further dependency for other projects. Arabica is intended to provide a kind of early interim solution to bundle the necessary technology stack for publishing.

qualiacode 8y ago
First of all I think you both have a point. As @sevensor rightly pointed out my approach with the arabica boilerplate is relying heavily on other software meaning on a. Markdown b. LaTeX (TeX Live) and BibLaTeX and on KOMA-Script c. pandoc d. YAML I think it is fair to say that a technology stack like that leads to quite a bit of tech debt. But in light of other approaches we are better of using stacks like this. In connection to this: maintenance of the pandoc latex template in particular is not easy at all, as @sevensor pointed out correctly. My current approach is to avoid most of the standard variables and to merge changes to the official template.latex back into arabica. As @megustavulva pointed out the arabica project is currently in early stage and to date is no more than a proof of concept. It explores the technology stack needed to deliver a solid workflow for collaborative academic writing. Which brings me to a more general point I want to stress in this context because it is the motivation behind arabica. In my opinion there is a twofold problem with the academic writing and publication process. There are others but I do think those are among the biggest issues. 1. Academics utter tech confusion (one aspect of a long story) There is a massive confusion if it comes to the usage of current publication and communication technologies aka (just to make my point) sending thousand of e-mails back and forth between colleagues, reviewers and publishers forgetting to attach the MS-Word documents with twisted filenames like „List of participants 1. April _John_version2_corrected2018-01-01.docx“ realising that the publishers actually do want submissions to be in .doc or .tex file format. … Markdown as a base language seems to be a solid approach to me. Markdown lies right at the sweet spot between expressiveness and simplicity. 2. Academics broken publication policies (one aspect of a long story) There is a fundamentally broken publication practice. Publishers pocket money by charging essentially everyone: researchers, research financier, purchaser and society. This impertinence gets exceeded only by the willingness of researchers, research financier, purchasers and society to buy into their fake story that the publishers have to raise insane amounts because they have ensure the scientific quality. … Publishing using pandoc and especially templating with pandoc can potentially cancel out many of the (fake) interim steps made by many publishers. Publication methods enabled by packages like arabica will not solve those fundamental issues in academic communication and publication processes but they can help to find ways to publish more democratically, scientifically in a more collaborative and consistent manner.

qualiacode 8y ago

First of all I think you both have a point. As @sevensor rightly pointed out my approach with the arabica boilerplate is relying heavily on other software meaning on a. Markdown b. LaTeX (TeX Live) and BibLaTeX and on KOMA-Script c. pandoc d. YAML I think it is fair to say that a technology stack like that leads to quite a bit of tech debt. But in light of other approaches we are better of using stacks like this. In connection to this: maintenance of the pandoc latex template in particular is not easy at all, as @sevensor pointed out correctly. My current approach is to avoid most of the standard variables and to merge changes to the official template.latex back into arabica. As @megustavulva pointed out the arabica project is currently in early stage and to date is no more than a proof of concept. It explores the technology stack needed to deliver a solid workflow for collaborative academic writing. Which brings me to a more general point I want to stress in this context because it is the motivation behind arabica. In my opinion there is a twofold problem with the academic writing and publication process. There are others but I do think those are among the biggest issues. 1. Academics utter tech confusion (one aspect of a long story) There is a massive confusion if it comes to the usage of current publication and communication technologies aka (just to make my point) sending thousand of e-mails back and forth between colleagues, reviewers and publishers forgetting to attach the MS-Word documents with twisted filenames like „List of participants 1. April _John_version2_corrected2018-01-01.docx“ realising that the publishers actually do want submissions to be in .doc or .tex file format. … Markdown as a base language seems to be a solid approach to me. Markdown lies right at the sweet spot between expressiveness and simplicity. 2. Academics broken publication policies (one aspect of a long story) There is a fundamentally broken publication practice. Publishers pocket money by charging essentially everyone: researchers, research financier, purchaser and society. This impertinence gets exceeded only by the willingness of researchers, research financier, purchasers and society to buy into their fake story that the publishers have to raise insane amounts because they have ensure the scientific quality. … Publishing using pandoc and especially templating with pandoc can potentially cancel out many of the (fake) interim steps made by many publishers. Publication methods enabled by packages like arabica will not solve those fundamental issues in academic communication and publication processes but they can help to find ways to publish more democratically, scientifically in a more collaborative and consistent manner.