14 ms·

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

583 points by napsternxg 3y ago

adastra22 3y ago
Export to print-quality PDF?
kstrauser 3y ago
So: * More in the space of LaTeX than Markdown (but with elements of each). * Written in JavaScript (so lots of of people can contribute in a language they already know). * MIT license. Nice! I don't know that I have an immediate use for it today, but this looks super nifty. If I did want to write something that needed some LaTeX-y features, and wasn't aiming for publication in a place that required it, I'd give Nota a shot. While I think Knuth is basically a demigod, it's not like he descended from on high, gave us TeX, and said "thou shalt never try anything new ever again".
- fbdab103 3y ago
  TeX was definitely groundbreaking, but I consider it a product of its time. Far too much cleverness in macro expansions and weaving tricks to keep memory usage in check for what are now laughable limits. Missing far too many niceties in comparison to modern languages with more guardrails to protect yourself from silly mistakes. The only way I can write Latex is to heavily rely upon \input{} segments to keep isolated blocks in case I break something through a missed escape. I keep yearning for a modern take, but it feels like we are stuck in a local optimum from which there is no escape. New platform has to fight with the decades of accumulated inertia and packages which exist in Tex.
  - troymc 3y ago
    Here's a modern take: https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
    - CJefferson 3y ago
      For me, there is one fundamental issue which makes me want to switch from LaTeX -- it can't produce accessible documents (and good HTML would do just fine as accessible). LaTeX is making good progress in this area. Amazingly (to me) it seems typst is doing even worse than LaTeX, while starting much later! I'm happy to be told they have succeeded in this area of course.
      - nicce 3y ago
        While the accessibility is an important area, it affects minority of the people. You need to get the core functionality first before you can spend resources on accessibility. Latex is very old and has the features; they can focus on accessibility now.
        CJefferson 3y ago
        No, I completely disagree. You need to design accessibility in from the start, it's almost impossible to retrofit. Very few systems manage to add high-quality accessibility later on.
        nicce 3y ago
        You should design it is not necessary to implement from the beginning.
        laurmaedje 3y ago
        I'm one of the Typst devs and I do agree with you here. LaTeX has a lot of trouble with accessibility because it's hard to retain semantic information through layers of macros. However, I think we are in a better starting position because Typst is designed to revolve around semantic elements that the compiler can actually understand. We haven't gotten to it yet (there's lots to do), but we want to use this information both to output Tagged PDFs and for semantic HTML export. I guess we'll see how it turns out!
        3y ago
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    There are plenty of these markup languages. The reason none of them really challenge tex/latex in its own space, is that they don't aim to do what tex/latex does. Latex is "typographically-complete". Markdown and friends are explicitly not. HTML+CSS is. But what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as possible, to not interfere with the content that the human is writing. For instance, Latex uses curly brackets {} for macro arguments, because they are least used brackets for content. So when you are reading a latex source, you know that () and [] are content, and only {} are ambiguous [2]. Nota, uses a mix of all three brackets for its syntax, causing additional pain for the person reading/writing the source. The replacement for TeX/latex is never going to a simpler language. It is going to a language just as complex as latex. But it can definitely be cleaned up and sped up compared to latex. IMHO, somebody should write tex from scratch, improve it's syntax but otherwise keep it largely unchanged. Basically, any plain latex source using some of the popular packages should continue to compile and give the same output. That is the only reasonable way out. [1] A typographically-complete language will never have a non-clunky syntax. [2] Escaped brackets \{1,2,3 \} are literal curly brackets. Personally, I only use them for mathematical sets and have defined a macro \set, so in my documents {} are 99% not ambiguous.
    - DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
      > what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as possible, to not interfere with the content that the human is writing I could not disagree more. LaTeX syntax is not 'clunky', it's a mess, and has intentionally been engineered right from the start to be clever rather than consistent. And it's not the syntax only, the obvious mess that is LaTeX's surface goes right on, right to the heart ("the guts" as TeXnicians prefer to say) of the machinery, where no concern is dealt with separately, and anything can influence and break everything else. Hell you don't even get a semblance of sane text (string) processing or decent numerical computation. Yes, you can do it, in the way you could use a toothbrush or wet wipes to paint your house. > Latex is "typographically-complete" Yes as long as one is ready to ignore the fact that quite a few simple things are quite difficult to achieve in LaTeX, e.g. keeping lines the same height and keep register instead of jumping around whenever a superscript is encountered. > The replacement for TeX/latex is never going to a simpler language. It is going to a language just as complex as latex. The complexity of LaTeX is just in part due to the complexities of typesetting. It is complex because of an endless litany of bad design choices. HTML+CSS+JS gets a lot of flak for being too complex, but they pale in comparison. For example[1]: In order to use numerical codepoints to write 東京, you can write any of: ^^^^6771 ^^^^4eac \char"6771 \char"4EAC The space between the entities is used to signal the end of the codepoint number, hence to write 東京 with a space you must use tricks, one of \char"6771{} \char"4EAC \char"6771\ \char"4EAC In this system, ^^5c represents the backslash. But, unlike reasonable systems which TeX is not one of, using numerical reference doesn't deactivate the backslash's special role as command indicator. Compare this to XML / HTML 東京 which is a much more reasonable syntax, not any harder to write, and uses an explicit end-of-command marker instead of the 'clever' space which is highly problematic. [1]: https://agiletribe.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/adding-unicode-characters-to-latex-documents/ https://agiletribe.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/adding-unicode-c...
  - runeks 3y ago
    > I keep yearning for a modern take, but it feels like we are stuck in a local optimum from which there is no escape. New platform has to fight with the decades of accumulated inertia and packages which exist in Tex. I believe the issue is that the better-than-LaTeX language needs to be not just better, but so much better that all the tooling and extensions for LaTeX are ported to it. Before this, it won’t be better than LaTeX. So it’s a kind of a chicken-and-egg issue.
  - nabla9 3y ago
    TeX is still unparalleled in layout and all fine details. But writeing Tex/Latex every day is not the best way to do it. The correct way to do it is: Your favorite markup -> pandoc script and includes -> Latex
- c-cube 3y ago
  You might also want to look at https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/.
jxf 3y ago
> 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's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  > 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
  - digdugdirk 3y ago
    There are some genuine benefits that come along with. I mean, if I could have auto expand inline footnotes/references in a document, I'd be a happy camper.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Do you object to the interactive Vega widget? https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 Reputable scientific journals now post videos online alongside their articles. Interactivity is even better for understanding. But permanence is an issue I suppose.
    - DistractionRect 3y ago
      I'm not saying it's all bad. Digital augmentation can be handy (love the hell out of document search), but honestly their examples aren't compelling. I think accessibility is a major issue, where the text doesn't make as much sense without the interactive bits, and often the text itself isn't substantial enough to be stand alone. But also, it's starting to cross the line between web app and document. I can print out a pdf and I just lose peripheral QoL benefits like document search. However, if I try to print a web app I usually lose a lot of the content/context. Edit: as far as supplemental material goes, I'm all for it. People learn differently, so video, audio, web app, whatever are all great supplemental materials, but a good document should be able to stand by itself.
esafak 3y ago
Basically this is markup + code (Javascript), which is a combination targeted by MDX. The last time someone mentioned this, the author said Nota is geared towards documentation, while MDX is geared towards web sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349579 If that is so, I think someone needs to wrap Nota into a product for it to take off. Because while the results look great, fiddling with node.js to build a document is too much work -- it's like Latex all over again. Most people will prefer to use Notion or a word processor.
- fn-mote 3y ago
  The fact that Nota comes with a default style (some kind of article style) already puts it in a completely different league than MDX. MDX is ready, willing, and able to use whatever React/Vue/etc framework you use, but that means it doesn't come with any opinions out of the box. Nota feels to me like it could be plugged in to a static site generator. Except then you have to get the two to cooperate. Still, I think that's an achievable hope for someone a little more dedicated than I am.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Yeah this looks like a sensible extension to Markdown in a way I quite like the look of. Might be worth spending some time plugging it into Nikola (which does one thing I like really well - let's me blog as iPython notebooks, but that's not always appropriate).
- troymc 3y ago
  > It's like Latex all over again. LaTeX, or more generally, the TeX family, never went away. It's still the go-to toolkit for writing journal papers in most of the STEM disciplines. Moreover, Nota is not a direct competitor to the TeX family because Nota generates something for web browsers to read, whereas xxxTeX generates something for PDF readers to read. (And yes, I know xxxTeX can generate other output formats but most people use it to generate PDF.)
epgui 3y ago
> Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I strongly disagree in the general case. PDFs all the way.
politelemon 3y ago
The trouble with js used then becomes whether the browser has implemented whatever function that nota expects, in the same way as other browsers, or implemented at all. Even in modern web development there are situations where things don't work in Firefox or let's say KDE browser. This leads to the usual notice put up be lazy or incompetent developers about viewing in Chrome/Safari only.
lagniappe 3y ago
Any new language that shows me the code right away gets extra points
dang 3y ago
Related: Nota: A Document Language for the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31348316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31348316 - May 2022 (55 comments)
Brajeshwar 3y ago
Quick reading tells me this is Pandoc[1] but in JavaScript. Interesting, would love to see a bunch of examples such as a Static Site Generator, etc. to make it easy for people to related to fast and try it out. 1. https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org
slmjkdbtl 3y ago
Great website, typography and logo
mppowers 3y ago
I would be interested in a comparison between this and Jupyter notebooks. Notebooks seem like they'd be easier to use than a specific language for most users.
- esafak 3y ago
  Mentioned in passing of section 4: https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/
zellyn 3y ago
If you follow the links, I think https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/ makes a compelling argument for the benefits of Nota at least in the niche of its intended use-case: making programming language academic papers more understandable. As mentioned in another comment, rendering to high-quality PDF is an obvious need/question: can it do that? (Perhaps) better would be rendering to LaTeX for compatibility with existing system.
zaptheimpaler 3y ago
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/ https://quarto.org/
- jskherman 3y ago
  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.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  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/ https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/ [0]: https://astro.build/ https://astro.build/ [1]: https://sjer.red/ https://sjer.red/ source at https://github.com/shepherdjerred/shepherdjerred.com https://github.com/shepherdjerred/shepherdjerred.com
- defanor 3y ago
  I use XHTML, mixed with a little custom XML, and processing with XSLT to produce final XHTML [1]: all of HTML is usable that way, the generation process is customizable, the dependencies are relatively easily manageable, the involved formats are standardized. [1] https://git.uberspace.net/homepage/ https://git.uberspace.net/homepage/
maegul 3y ago
Can’t help but contrast it to ObservableHQ (https://observablehq.com/ https://observablehq.com/), which is basically front end notebooks with reactivity and other niceties. Leans right into “dynamism” while also allowing for simple document authoring. Though it’s a platform, there’s a runtime and some open substitutes for the bits not open IIRC.
- esafak 3y ago
  He mentions it in section 4 of https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/
38 3y ago
not sure why they insist on hiding this, but here is the source: https://github.com/nota-lang/nota https://github.com/nota-lang/nota
promiseofbeans 3y ago
Similar: - https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/ - https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ - https://markdoc.dev/ https://markdoc.dev/ - https://mdxjs.com/ https://mdxjs.com/ - https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
- Levitating 3y ago
  Pandocs list of supported formats is impressive!
kimi 3y ago
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.
- bow_ 3y ago
  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 https://github.com/pypa/readme_renderer/issues/205
  - kimi 3y ago
    Same.
- fburnaby 3y ago
  asciidoc is my favourite too, thanks to Asciidoctor. I agree, asciidoc hits the sweet spots as a format. Been frustrated by the tooling lately though. I can see the huge effort put into Asciidoctor, and am thankful for it, but there are still big downsides i.e. no semantic html 5 output, difficult (or at least more difficult than necessary) integration with image generators, heavyweight (only ruby dependency on my entire machine). I imagine this just needs more time and resources put to it, as all these issues (except the ruby one) are open on GitHub.
wcrichton 3y ago
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 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-benchmark 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/ https://typst.app/ Also: the next version of Nota will be written 99% in Rust :-)
- manxman 3y ago
  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.
  - celim307 3y ago
    Surprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests
auggierose 3y ago
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?
- Ar-Curunir 3y ago
  You can just replace the name and label with whatever you want. Also in general you’ll be referencing an item much more frequently than you’ll be defining it.
classified 3y ago
I could use a markup helper like Nota, but having NodeJS & npm in the mix gives me pause.
FridgeSeal 3y ago
> 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.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  It used to be marketed as "for the browser" in previous HN posts, but now it looks like it was taken out. If the tool aims to allow to create documents and papers and does not support static output then I don't get how that would work.
agileAlligator 3y ago
Reminiscent of Gwern's website[0] (click on any one of the articles to see what I am talking about). Was that an inspiration in creating this? [0]: https://www.gwern.net/index https://www.gwern.net/index
- esafak 3y ago
  Good catch! It also reminds me of Apple Hypercards and Xerox NoteCards.
cryptos 3y ago
Is there an advantage over AsciiDoc? In my opionion AsciiDoc is really powerful and offers anything an author of academic papers (and blog posts) would need. The output is also not limited to html.
max_ 3y ago
I thought this was going to be something like Idyll [0]. [0]: https://idyll-lang.org/docs https://idyll-lang.org/docs
eimrine 3y ago
I am not a really intelligent person, but having an ability to caps while being in caps (that's how a Nota word is written on the example) is kind of too xzibit-like.
daitangio 3y ago
I do not know. I thing Emacs org-mode is better and less Javascript-dependant. Also https://docusaurus.io/ https://docusaurus.io/ is very nice and flexible. I suggest to look at these two to extend nota in similar way
runeks 3y ago
> 2. Why Nota? > Existing document tools like LaTeX, Pandoc, Markdown, and Scribble can (for the most part) only generate static web pages. I feel like Nota is underselling itself here, or at least not properly arguing for why a new language was created. If LaTeX were a perfectly fine document language, then surely we could extend e.g. Pandoc to provide these dynamic features when rendering LaTeX to a web page. But instead, a new document language was created. Why?
- bjoli 3y ago
  I am not really sure about their description. Scribble is structured text that can be converted to whatever you want. You could write scribble renderer that renders the document as a server that serves the document in parts over Ajax.
rmrfchik 3y ago
I'm not sure is it safe to rely documentation on nodejs based software. In my humble opinion JavaScript world evolves so fast and obsolete so many things that writing reliable software (in term of availability and sustainability) is very very very hard task.
johnchristopher 3y ago
> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. cough docx cough And yeah, it's a real problem for data portability and preservation. And no Librefoffice isn't up to the task (onlyoffice seems to do better).
nologic01 3y ago
The problem with any new initiative in this space is that it enters a field that is more than well populated. It doesn't matter if existing solutions are less than perfect. Its like walking into a historic European city that has architecture going back millennia and arguing for a great new building design. Greenfield space is scarce and people will not just demolish old structures to try something new. They need to sense overwhelming advantage. The analogy gives some hints as to what needs to happen for a new approach to take hold. In building construction, massively better use of space was one example: For better or worse, use of steel and reinforced concrete opened the vertical dimension and the rest is history. Is there such an unexplored dimension that could entice people into yet another document format to "improve" on ascii, restructuredText, wikitext, markdown, tex/latex, asciidoc, html etc. etc.? The stock answer is some sort of semantic hypertext infrastructure. The original vision is still unfulfilled. If we assume that the walled gardens of today are just a bad nightmare that will pass away, in a re-decentralized web one would need modern, user-friendly and empowering document writing infrastructure. But there might be other dimensions that would elevate document writing and sharing to new heights. The beauty of innovation is that it is not bound by conventional rules and pre-existing wisdom.
- astrobe_ 3y ago
  If you want a decentralized web, a "Userweb" (maybe to parallel a bit Usenet), in my view you need a BitTorrent-like protocol. You need efficient documents formats, which means formats that don't try to do everything, which means that you have to segregate different document types in different files - e.g. tables in some standard spreadsheet format - in contrast to HTML that tries to do tables, graphic (SVG), etc. on its own. Separating each thing in their own file lets the user choose which programs they want to view/manipulate documents (rather that the one-size-fits-all browser), help with distribution across the network, and help with low storage/low bandwidth situations (or do more with the hardware we have right now). So from my perspective, the answer is negative: there's nothing new to invent. Specialize and refine what was already invented.
wiz21c 3y ago
Give me an inverted IPython and I'll be happy. By inverted I mean: I write code and from time to time I want to document it with rich information (plots, equations, a bit more structured text). So I would love to have powerful comments in my regular code. I'm not much interested in bits of code in a single document.
- adz5a 3y ago
  a version of this idea in clojure in which a clojure namespace is rendered as an html page with notbook like primitives https://github.clerk.garden/nextjournal/clerk-demo/commit/8a1ea546ac69caae51718f684bf26fe65194ec13/ https://github.clerk.garden/nextjournal/clerk-demo/commit/8a...
amelius 3y ago
> The goal of Nota is to bring documents into the 21st century. I think the modern approach might be to recognize that all readers are different, and that they would use an LLM to transform the document into the form that is suitable for a particular reader.
BuboBubo 3y ago
I am currently writing and formatting a very long document using: - Pandoc Markdown and Pandoc : https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html - PagedJS : https://pagedjs.org/ https://pagedjs.org/ - Make & Python as glue and helpers for compilation I manage my references using Zotero like any other academic writer. The configuration is less than 100 lines and I can get a pretty solid result using only basic HTML/CSS skills intertwined with Markdown. You sometimes end up with weird formatting issues but there is nothing you can't fix using HTML/CSS/JS. My manuscript has images, figures, tables, code, etc... It's good to see people trying to tackle the problem of formatting documents again. LaTeX is good but not for everything and the ecosystem is extremely hard to understand. Word, Pages and other similar tools are... proprietary. What would be a game changer for my use case is to see something like Scrivener with more formatting/layout options: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
rufius 3y ago
I like the idea, but the reliance on Node is a killer for me. I just don’t want anything to do with that.
choeger 3y ago
Please, please, please, make sure that it uses a context-free grammar. For the live of Knuth, correct that one stupid mistake he made and allow other people to parse your syntax. Good things will follow!
zelphirkalt 3y ago
If it did not compile to JS (needing a browser to display? or at least a JS engine?) and did not depend on NPM and NodeJS, it would have a higher chance of being adopted into my workflows. I am also still wondering, what it does, that I would need in a blog or even academic paper, that I could not express using reStructuredText or the Org format. Especially reStructuredText is quite powerful, and even more so, when you add custom directives to it. I built a rudimentary wiki on top of that, with hypertext linking between pages, table of content and so on. Custom directives could be used for citations maybe.
cmovq 3y ago
> Then you can build a single Nota document by running these shell commands: > 1. npm install --global @nota-lang/nota That's going to be a showstopper for a lot of people.
lloydatkinson 3y ago
This looks very cool. I noticed it linked to Penrose which I’d never heard of and seems very cool also. Given this is a new project I would really consider using Deno instead of Node. You’ll have a more reliable and consistent developer experience.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bigbuppo 3y ago
Is this a new feature of Nota Bene 14? Might have to give it another look then.
dcchambers 3y ago
An aside: the font on that website is gorgeous...and perfectly crisp and readable on a screen despite having serifs. I wonder why it looks so much sharper than some (serif) fonts I see on the web.

583 points by napsternxg 3y ago

Export to print-quality PDF?

So: * More in the space of LaTeX than Markdown (but with elements of each). * Written in JavaScript (so lots of of people can contribute in a language they already know). * MIT license. Nice! I don't know that I have an immediate use for it today, but this looks super nifty. If I did want to write something that needed some LaTeX-y features, and wasn't aiming for publication in a place that required it, I'd give Nota a shot. While I think Knuth is basically a demigod, it's not like he descended from on high, gave us TeX, and said "thou shalt never try anything new ever again".

fbdab103 3y ago
TeX was definitely groundbreaking, but I consider it a product of its time. Far too much cleverness in macro expansions and weaving tricks to keep memory usage in check for what are now laughable limits. Missing far too many niceties in comparison to modern languages with more guardrails to protect yourself from silly mistakes. The only way I can write Latex is to heavily rely upon \input{} segments to keep isolated blocks in case I break something through a missed escape. I keep yearning for a modern take, but it feels like we are stuck in a local optimum from which there is no escape. New platform has to fight with the decades of accumulated inertia and packages which exist in Tex.
- troymc 3y ago
  Here's a modern take: https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
  - CJefferson 3y ago
    For me, there is one fundamental issue which makes me want to switch from LaTeX -- it can't produce accessible documents (and good HTML would do just fine as accessible). LaTeX is making good progress in this area. Amazingly (to me) it seems typst is doing even worse than LaTeX, while starting much later! I'm happy to be told they have succeeded in this area of course.
    - nicce 3y ago
      While the accessibility is an important area, it affects minority of the people. You need to get the core functionality first before you can spend resources on accessibility. Latex is very old and has the features; they can focus on accessibility now.
      - CJefferson 3y ago
        No, I completely disagree. You need to design accessibility in from the start, it's almost impossible to retrofit. Very few systems manage to add high-quality accessibility later on.
        nicce 3y ago
        You should design it is not necessary to implement from the beginning.
        laurmaedje 3y ago
        I'm one of the Typst devs and I do agree with you here. LaTeX has a lot of trouble with accessibility because it's hard to retain semantic information through layers of macros. However, I think we are in a better starting position because Typst is designed to revolve around semantic elements that the compiler can actually understand. We haven't gotten to it yet (there's lots to do), but we want to use this information both to output Tagged PDFs and for semantic HTML export. I guess we'll see how it turns out!
        3y ago
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  There are plenty of these markup languages. The reason none of them really challenge tex/latex in its own space, is that they don't aim to do what tex/latex does. Latex is "typographically-complete". Markdown and friends are explicitly not. HTML+CSS is. But what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as possible, to not interfere with the content that the human is writing. For instance, Latex uses curly brackets {} for macro arguments, because they are least used brackets for content. So when you are reading a latex source, you know that () and [] are content, and only {} are ambiguous [2]. Nota, uses a mix of all three brackets for its syntax, causing additional pain for the person reading/writing the source. The replacement for TeX/latex is never going to a simpler language. It is going to a language just as complex as latex. But it can definitely be cleaned up and sped up compared to latex. IMHO, somebody should write tex from scratch, improve it's syntax but otherwise keep it largely unchanged. Basically, any plain latex source using some of the popular packages should continue to compile and give the same output. That is the only reasonable way out. [1] A typographically-complete language will never have a non-clunky syntax. [2] Escaped brackets \{1,2,3 \} are literal curly brackets. Personally, I only use them for mathematical sets and have defined a macro \set, so in my documents {} are 99% not ambiguous.
  - DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
    > what latex has is a reasonable enough syntax that a human can write it by hand, unlike HTML+CSS. Moreover, the syntax, though clunky [1] is designed, as much as possible, to not interfere with the content that the human is writing I could not disagree more. LaTeX syntax is not 'clunky', it's a mess, and has intentionally been engineered right from the start to be clever rather than consistent. And it's not the syntax only, the obvious mess that is LaTeX's surface goes right on, right to the heart ("the guts" as TeXnicians prefer to say) of the machinery, where no concern is dealt with separately, and anything can influence and break everything else. Hell you don't even get a semblance of sane text (string) processing or decent numerical computation. Yes, you can do it, in the way you could use a toothbrush or wet wipes to paint your house. > Latex is "typographically-complete" Yes as long as one is ready to ignore the fact that quite a few simple things are quite difficult to achieve in LaTeX, e.g. keeping lines the same height and keep register instead of jumping around whenever a superscript is encountered. > The replacement for TeX/latex is never going to a simpler language. It is going to a language just as complex as latex. The complexity of LaTeX is just in part due to the complexities of typesetting. It is complex because of an endless litany of bad design choices. HTML+CSS+JS gets a lot of flak for being too complex, but they pale in comparison. For example[1]: In order to use numerical codepoints to write 東京, you can write any of: ^^^^6771 ^^^^4eac \char"6771 \char"4EAC The space between the entities is used to signal the end of the codepoint number, hence to write 東京 with a space you must use tricks, one of \char"6771{} \char"4EAC \char"6771\ \char"4EAC In this system, ^^5c represents the backslash. But, unlike reasonable systems which TeX is not one of, using numerical reference doesn't deactivate the backslash's special role as command indicator. Compare this to XML / HTML 東京 which is a much more reasonable syntax, not any harder to write, and uses an explicit end-of-command marker instead of the 'clever' space which is highly problematic. [1]: https://agiletribe.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/adding-unicode-characters-to-latex-documents/ https://agiletribe.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/adding-unicode-c...
- runeks 3y ago
  > I keep yearning for a modern take, but it feels like we are stuck in a local optimum from which there is no escape. New platform has to fight with the decades of accumulated inertia and packages which exist in Tex. I believe the issue is that the better-than-LaTeX language needs to be not just better, but so much better that all the tooling and extensions for LaTeX are ported to it. Before this, it won’t be better than LaTeX. So it’s a kind of a chicken-and-egg issue.
- nabla9 3y ago
  TeX is still unparalleled in layout and all fine details. But writeing Tex/Latex every day is not the best way to do it. The correct way to do it is: Your favorite markup -> pandoc script and includes -> Latex
c-cube 3y ago
You might also want to look at https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/.

jxf 3y ago

> 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's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug.

DistractionRect 3y ago
> 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
- digdugdirk 3y ago
  There are some genuine benefits that come along with. I mean, if I could have auto expand inline footnotes/references in a document, I'd be a happy camper.
- esafak 3y ago
  Do you object to the interactive Vega widget? https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 Reputable scientific journals now post videos online alongside their articles. Interactivity is even better for understanding. But permanence is an issue I suppose.
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    I'm not saying it's all bad. Digital augmentation can be handy (love the hell out of document search), but honestly their examples aren't compelling. I think accessibility is a major issue, where the text doesn't make as much sense without the interactive bits, and often the text itself isn't substantial enough to be stand alone. But also, it's starting to cross the line between web app and document. I can print out a pdf and I just lose peripheral QoL benefits like document search. However, if I try to print a web app I usually lose a lot of the content/context. Edit: as far as supplemental material goes, I'm all for it. People learn differently, so video, audio, web app, whatever are all great supplemental materials, but a good document should be able to stand by itself.

esafak 3y ago

Basically this is markup + code (Javascript), which is a combination targeted by MDX. The last time someone mentioned this, the author said Nota is geared towards documentation, while MDX is geared towards web sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349579 If that is so, I think someone needs to wrap Nota into a product for it to take off. Because while the results look great, fiddling with node.js to build a document is too much work -- it's like Latex all over again. Most people will prefer to use Notion or a word processor.

fn-mote 3y ago
The fact that Nota comes with a default style (some kind of article style) already puts it in a completely different league than MDX. MDX is ready, willing, and able to use whatever React/Vue/etc framework you use, but that means it doesn't come with any opinions out of the box. Nota feels to me like it could be plugged in to a static site generator. Except then you have to get the two to cooperate. Still, I think that's an achievable hope for someone a little more dedicated than I am.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Yeah this looks like a sensible extension to Markdown in a way I quite like the look of. Might be worth spending some time plugging it into Nikola (which does one thing I like really well - let's me blog as iPython notebooks, but that's not always appropriate).
troymc 3y ago
> It's like Latex all over again. LaTeX, or more generally, the TeX family, never went away. It's still the go-to toolkit for writing journal papers in most of the STEM disciplines. Moreover, Nota is not a direct competitor to the TeX family because Nota generates something for web browsers to read, whereas xxxTeX generates something for PDF readers to read. (And yes, I know xxxTeX can generate other output formats but most people use it to generate PDF.)

epgui 3y ago

> Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I strongly disagree in the general case. PDFs all the way.

politelemon 3y ago

The trouble with js used then becomes whether the browser has implemented whatever function that nota expects, in the same way as other browsers, or implemented at all. Even in modern web development there are situations where things don't work in Firefox or let's say KDE browser. This leads to the usual notice put up be lazy or incompetent developers about viewing in Chrome/Safari only.

lagniappe 3y ago

Any new language that shows me the code right away gets extra points

dang 3y ago

Related: Nota: A Document Language for the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31348316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31348316 - May 2022 (55 comments)

Brajeshwar 3y ago

Quick reading tells me this is Pandoc[1] but in JavaScript. Interesting, would love to see a bunch of examples such as a Static Site Generator, etc. to make it easy for people to related to fast and try it out. 1. https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org

slmjkdbtl 3y ago

Great website, typography and logo

mppowers 3y ago

I would be interested in a comparison between this and Jupyter notebooks. Notebooks seem like they'd be easier to use than a specific language for most users.

esafak 3y ago
Mentioned in passing of section 4: https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/

zellyn 3y ago

If you follow the links, I think https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/ makes a compelling argument for the benefits of Nota at least in the niche of its intended use-case: making programming language academic papers more understandable. As mentioned in another comment, rendering to high-quality PDF is an obvious need/question: can it do that? (Perhaps) better would be rendering to LaTeX for compatibility with existing system.

zaptheimpaler 3y ago

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/ https://quarto.org/

jskherman 3y ago
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.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
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/ https://docs.astro.build/en/tutorial/0-introduction/ [0]: https://astro.build/ https://astro.build/ [1]: https://sjer.red/ https://sjer.red/ source at https://github.com/shepherdjerred/shepherdjerred.com https://github.com/shepherdjerred/shepherdjerred.com
defanor 3y ago
I use XHTML, mixed with a little custom XML, and processing with XSLT to produce final XHTML [1]: all of HTML is usable that way, the generation process is customizable, the dependencies are relatively easily manageable, the involved formats are standardized. [1] https://git.uberspace.net/homepage/ https://git.uberspace.net/homepage/

maegul 3y ago

Can’t help but contrast it to ObservableHQ (https://observablehq.com/ https://observablehq.com/), which is basically front end notebooks with reactivity and other niceties. Leans right into “dynamism” while also allowing for simple document authoring. Though it’s a platform, there’s a runtime and some open substitutes for the bits not open IIRC.

esafak 3y ago
He mentions it in section 4 of https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/

38 3y ago

not sure why they insist on hiding this, but here is the source: https://github.com/nota-lang/nota https://github.com/nota-lang/nota

promiseofbeans 3y ago

Similar: - https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/ - https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ - https://markdoc.dev/ https://markdoc.dev/ - https://mdxjs.com/ https://mdxjs.com/ - https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/

Levitating 3y ago
Pandocs list of supported formats is impressive!

kimi 3y ago

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.

bow_ 3y ago
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 https://github.com/pypa/readme_renderer/issues/205
- kimi 3y ago
  Same.
fburnaby 3y ago
asciidoc is my favourite too, thanks to Asciidoctor. I agree, asciidoc hits the sweet spots as a format. Been frustrated by the tooling lately though. I can see the huge effort put into Asciidoctor, and am thankful for it, but there are still big downsides i.e. no semantic html 5 output, difficult (or at least more difficult than necessary) integration with image generators, heavyweight (only ruby dependency on my entire machine). I imagine this just needs more time and resources put to it, as all these issues (except the ruby one) are open on GitHub.

wcrichton 3y ago

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 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-benchmark 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/ https://typst.app/ Also: the next version of Nota will be written 99% in Rust :-)

manxman 3y ago
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.
- celim307 3y ago
  Surprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests

auggierose 3y ago

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?

Ar-Curunir 3y ago
You can just replace the name and label with whatever you want. Also in general you’ll be referencing an item much more frequently than you’ll be defining it.

classified 3y ago

I could use a markup helper like Nota, but having NodeJS & npm in the mix gives me pause.

FridgeSeal 3y ago

> 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.

throwaway290 3y ago
It used to be marketed as "for the browser" in previous HN posts, but now it looks like it was taken out. If the tool aims to allow to create documents and papers and does not support static output then I don't get how that would work.

agileAlligator 3y ago

Reminiscent of Gwern's website[0] (click on any one of the articles to see what I am talking about). Was that an inspiration in creating this? [0]: https://www.gwern.net/index https://www.gwern.net/index

esafak 3y ago
Good catch! It also reminds me of Apple Hypercards and Xerox NoteCards.

cryptos 3y ago

Is there an advantage over AsciiDoc? In my opionion AsciiDoc is really powerful and offers anything an author of academic papers (and blog posts) would need. The output is also not limited to html.

max_ 3y ago

I thought this was going to be something like Idyll [0]. [0]: https://idyll-lang.org/docs https://idyll-lang.org/docs

eimrine 3y ago

I am not a really intelligent person, but having an ability to caps while being in caps (that's how a Nota word is written on the example) is kind of too xzibit-like.

daitangio 3y ago

I do not know. I thing Emacs org-mode is better and less Javascript-dependant. Also https://docusaurus.io/ https://docusaurus.io/ is very nice and flexible. I suggest to look at these two to extend nota in similar way

runeks 3y ago

> 2. Why Nota? > Existing document tools like LaTeX, Pandoc, Markdown, and Scribble can (for the most part) only generate static web pages. I feel like Nota is underselling itself here, or at least not properly arguing for why a new language was created. If LaTeX were a perfectly fine document language, then surely we could extend e.g. Pandoc to provide these dynamic features when rendering LaTeX to a web page. But instead, a new document language was created. Why?

bjoli 3y ago
I am not really sure about their description. Scribble is structured text that can be converted to whatever you want. You could write scribble renderer that renders the document as a server that serves the document in parts over Ajax.

rmrfchik 3y ago

I'm not sure is it safe to rely documentation on nodejs based software. In my humble opinion JavaScript world evolves so fast and obsolete so many things that writing reliable software (in term of availability and sustainability) is very very very hard task.

johnchristopher 3y ago

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. cough docx cough And yeah, it's a real problem for data portability and preservation. And no Librefoffice isn't up to the task (onlyoffice seems to do better).

nologic01 3y ago

The problem with any new initiative in this space is that it enters a field that is more than well populated. It doesn't matter if existing solutions are less than perfect. Its like walking into a historic European city that has architecture going back millennia and arguing for a great new building design. Greenfield space is scarce and people will not just demolish old structures to try something new. They need to sense overwhelming advantage. The analogy gives some hints as to what needs to happen for a new approach to take hold. In building construction, massively better use of space was one example: For better or worse, use of steel and reinforced concrete opened the vertical dimension and the rest is history. Is there such an unexplored dimension that could entice people into yet another document format to "improve" on ascii, restructuredText, wikitext, markdown, tex/latex, asciidoc, html etc. etc.? The stock answer is some sort of semantic hypertext infrastructure. The original vision is still unfulfilled. If we assume that the walled gardens of today are just a bad nightmare that will pass away, in a re-decentralized web one would need modern, user-friendly and empowering document writing infrastructure. But there might be other dimensions that would elevate document writing and sharing to new heights. The beauty of innovation is that it is not bound by conventional rules and pre-existing wisdom.

astrobe_ 3y ago
If you want a decentralized web, a "Userweb" (maybe to parallel a bit Usenet), in my view you need a BitTorrent-like protocol. You need efficient documents formats, which means formats that don't try to do everything, which means that you have to segregate different document types in different files - e.g. tables in some standard spreadsheet format - in contrast to HTML that tries to do tables, graphic (SVG), etc. on its own. Separating each thing in their own file lets the user choose which programs they want to view/manipulate documents (rather that the one-size-fits-all browser), help with distribution across the network, and help with low storage/low bandwidth situations (or do more with the hardware we have right now). So from my perspective, the answer is negative: there's nothing new to invent. Specialize and refine what was already invented.

wiz21c 3y ago

Give me an inverted IPython and I'll be happy. By inverted I mean: I write code and from time to time I want to document it with rich information (plots, equations, a bit more structured text). So I would love to have powerful comments in my regular code. I'm not much interested in bits of code in a single document.

adz5a 3y ago
a version of this idea in clojure in which a clojure namespace is rendered as an html page with notbook like primitives https://github.clerk.garden/nextjournal/clerk-demo/commit/8a1ea546ac69caae51718f684bf26fe65194ec13/ https://github.clerk.garden/nextjournal/clerk-demo/commit/8a...

amelius 3y ago

> The goal of Nota is to bring documents into the 21st century. I think the modern approach might be to recognize that all readers are different, and that they would use an LLM to transform the document into the form that is suitable for a particular reader.

BuboBubo 3y ago

I am currently writing and formatting a very long document using: - Pandoc Markdown and Pandoc : https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html - PagedJS : https://pagedjs.org/ https://pagedjs.org/ - Make & Python as glue and helpers for compilation I manage my references using Zotero like any other academic writer. The configuration is less than 100 lines and I can get a pretty solid result using only basic HTML/CSS skills intertwined with Markdown. You sometimes end up with weird formatting issues but there is nothing you can't fix using HTML/CSS/JS. My manuscript has images, figures, tables, code, etc... It's good to see people trying to tackle the problem of formatting documents again. LaTeX is good but not for everything and the ecosystem is extremely hard to understand. Word, Pages and other similar tools are... proprietary. What would be a game changer for my use case is to see something like Scrivener with more formatting/layout options: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

rufius 3y ago

I like the idea, but the reliance on Node is a killer for me. I just don’t want anything to do with that.

choeger 3y ago

Please, please, please, make sure that it uses a context-free grammar. For the live of Knuth, correct that one stupid mistake he made and allow other people to parse your syntax. Good things will follow!

zelphirkalt 3y ago

If it did not compile to JS (needing a browser to display? or at least a JS engine?) and did not depend on NPM and NodeJS, it would have a higher chance of being adopted into my workflows. I am also still wondering, what it does, that I would need in a blog or even academic paper, that I could not express using reStructuredText or the Org format. Especially reStructuredText is quite powerful, and even more so, when you add custom directives to it. I built a rudimentary wiki on top of that, with hypertext linking between pages, table of content and so on. Custom directives could be used for citations maybe.

cmovq 3y ago

> Then you can build a single Nota document by running these shell commands: > 1. npm install --global @nota-lang/nota That's going to be a showstopper for a lot of people.

lloydatkinson 3y ago

This looks very cool. I noticed it linked to Penrose which I’d never heard of and seems very cool also. Given this is a new project I would really consider using Deno instead of Node. You’ll have a more reliable and consistent developer experience.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bigbuppo 3y ago

Is this a new feature of Nota Bene 14? Might have to give it another look then.

dcchambers 3y ago

An aside: the font on that website is gorgeous...and perfectly crisp and readable on a screen despite having serifs. I wonder why it looks so much sharper than some (serif) fonts I see on the web.