6 ms·
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
by 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 agoSurprised more legal docs aren’t tracked like git, with pull requests
- manxman 3y agoCause git ain’t user friendly enough for lawyers and they use word not a plain text editor which doesnt make it easy to see the diffs. But yes ;)
- SanderNL 3y agoStyle and substance separation is easy and should be a requirement. Legal is pure text "programming" and what I mean is that the style of the text has zero bearing on the judicial process. The benefits of working at the proper level of abstraction compound. It enables tech like diffs and git, which then nicely solves a bunch of other problems as well. Using Word completely side-steps all those benefits. Sure, you get a few nice buttons, but that's literally it. You are trapped forever with no way forward. This feels like actually programming in Word and manually highlighting comments to be green or something. It's a travesty IMO.
- esquivalience 3y agoI think markdown might be the solution here.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWe used to have word processors that exposed mark up. I wrote immense amounts of documentation in Wordstar on 8 bit machines and it was definitely more efficient than the WYSIWYG word processors that came later and faster even when the newer ones were running on much faster hardware. Something like Wordstar would be better than MarkDown.
- esafak 3y agoWordPerfect called it Reveal Codes.
- pbronez 3y agoMarkdown isn’t detailed enough for legal stuff. Internal references, tables, complex section numbering require extensive post processing or simply don’t work. You quickly wind up with a lot of hidden magic that frustrates people used to word. Last time I lost patience with doing Legal stuff in word and evaluated alternatives, I was most optimistic about Asciidoc. Unfortunately the ecosystem was relatively anemic… the strong syntax was limited by the tooling. Looks like there’s been some improvement, maybe I’ll try again. There’s a nice new homepage at least: https://asciidoc.org/ https://asciidoc.org/
- pseingatl 3y agoLawyers have gotten rid of secretaries and so spend time (and billing) futzing around with document formatting, fonts, margins, bullets, numbering, autonumbering and the like.
- glompers 3y agoMany PEs (professional engineers) too.
- jimbokun 3y agoTo me, that just calls for a sensible UI with attractive styling and interaction over a git backend for the heavy lifting of tracking changes through time. A lot of successful products have been built in this way. I've seen developers get upset with Apple for making successful products out of just giving a nice UI to a piece of open source tech that does the heavy lifting. Like it's cheating.
- smaudet 3y agoYou should research what happened with distros and UI systems...open source was building lots of nice UIs and you could even have them on Windows/Mac, but the was constant drama over the "right" way to code a UI framework...which led to a ton of fracturing and leaning back towards minimalism (because the nice stuff was always very heavy). This even happened with Microsoft, they had so many false starts and changes in messaging that they killed their own portfolios. I suspect at least that is why they "embraced linux" because it was excellent at web, and web wasn't busy changing every month (it has been, but that's a different story). Apple introduced Swift but besides new Xcode versions I get the general impression their tooling has been far more stable.
- usrusr 3y agoA moment of imagining how that would influence the market value of certain skillsets should easily cure you from that surprise ;) On the other hand, legal systems have effectively been doing the equivalent of git since basically forever. There have been very few law books written from the ground up. All other law authoring, be it by kings, priests, dictators or parliaments, was I the form of diffs to an existing codebase.
- alas44 3y agoActually the little known "Review" feature of word allows to visually track approve/reject/comment collaborative changes over a document in a really user friendly way, not need for git here
- todd8 3y agoOne of the interesting things that I discovered while working on some legal papers with a lawyer were that legal documents don't have copyright protection. Lawyers regularly copy and paste from other lawyers work. I suppose, that since legislators most often have backgrounds as lawyers, they legislated rules for themselves that are not the same as the rule the rest of us have to follow. I am not a lawyer so I don't know that anything in the previous paragraph is true; it's just based on a recollection of something I was told once a long time ago.
- dctoedt 3y ago> legal documents don't have copyright protection 1. That's an overstatement: For "original works of authorship," copyright happens automatically upon "fixation" in a "tangible medium of expression" (e.g., saving to a file, maybe even just typing). [0] And it doesn't take much "original ... authorship" to qualify for copyright protection. 2. Here's A hypothetical example: Alice drafts a contract from scratch as Version 1 and saves it to a file. It's copyrighted; on these facts, Alice owns the copyright. [0] Then Bob takes Alice's Version 1 and modifies it to create Version 1.1: Bob's "original" contributions to Version 1.1 are themselves protected by copyright, which Bob owns, bu with two caveats: (a) Bob has no claim to copyright in Alice's Version 1; and (b) Bob's own contributions to Version 1.1 won't be protected unless one or both of the following is true: (1) Bob had Alice's permission to base his "derivative work" on Alice's Version 1; [1] and/or (2) Bob's use of Version 1 qualified as "fair use" (a complicated question in itself). [2] NOTES: [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101; see also, e.g., https://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyright-violator/ https://www.adamsdrafting.com/the-contract-drafter-as-copyri... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/103 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/103 [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
- SebRollen 3y agoThe Common Paper app[1], though not quite a git workflow, has always struck me as being pretty close to how an software engineer might approach contracts: 1. An immutable set of standard terms, with variable references. 2. A collection of cover page variables, that modify the standard terms by reference. 3. A structured negotiation workflow, where users "propose changes" to the cover page variables with automatic "diff-ing" (redlining). It's not a product targeted to software engineers, but has always appealed to me as a way to sneak in some engineering best-practices into the world of lawyering :) Full disclosure: I'm an employee [1]: https://commonpaper.com/product/ https://commonpaper.com/product/
- glompers 3y agoNisus Writer Pro [0] has been around for 40 years this year IIRC (IANANWP) and has a user base who can vouch for many of the features that HN readers want something to offer. [0] https://nisus.com/pro https://nisus.com/pro
- ska 3y agoThe standard for legal docs is to redline changes with an additional tool, because you don't necessarily trust the other contributors. They have decent tools for this, and the system works ok I suppose. Editing tends to be in tic-toc fashion anyways so I guess it works. You could do someting like this with git and a markup language, but I don't know you'd convince many lawyers that the squeeze was worth the juice.
- kyawzazaw 3y agoWhat are the tools you mentioned here? Is there like a dominant software, similar to ArcGIS for GIS?
- ska 3y agoI don't know the names. They all seem to have the pro Acrobat stuff, but more often use something also bundled with search tools perhaps? Communication between lawyers on opposite "sides" often seems to be by PDF, not source (although sometimes that too) so I imagined they both have working docs kept separate because they don't want to to share some of the markup/comments. I asked one of them about that they claimed that using clean pdf output (no metadata or history) was worth the extra hassle as it avoided costly errors. Anyway that's my limited experience having dealt with a bunch of them - no expert.
- pseingatl 3y agoIt's never pdf. You can't easily make corrections on a pdf, never mind major revisions (such as moving sections around). If someone sends me a pdf I ask for a Word document, or convert the pdf to Word myself. Sending someone a pdf is a little like saying "fuck you."
- ska 3y agoAre you a lawyer ? The workflow i am recalling, nobody is editing pdfs directly.
- rawgabbit 3y agoI have never used it but it seems lawyers wants something like Clio which not only does manage documents but runs their entire business. https://www.clio.com/lawyaw/ https://www.clio.com/lawyaw/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_(software_company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_(software_company)
- TylerE 3y agoTry context over latex. Much more “gimme what I ask for” than being super academic about subsubsubsubheaders.
- Metus 3y agoI always disliked that it was so difficult to interact with Word if you wanted to create automated documents. Instead I'd love it if there was a developer-first experience to create standardised documents from nice looking participation certificates, invoices, memos, documentation up to multi-tome histories.
- archiewood 3y ago> Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience. Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is definitely the place to focus on improving, LaTeX just takes too damn long to get something good. If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence). It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e. --- title: Lorem Ipsum description: dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit --- ```sql petal_vs_sepal SELECT petal_length, sepal_length FROM iris_dataset_table ORDER BY 1 DESC ``` <ScatterPlot title="Petal vs Sepal Length" data={petal_vs_sepal} x=petal_length y=sepal_length /> The longest petal in the dataset is {petal_vs_sepal[0].petal_length}. Our design philosophy here is that the rendered documents should be beautiful by default, but highly configurable so you can get pixel perfect results. We’re also aiming for first class output options for desktop, mobile, PDF and image export. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 - 91 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 - 97 comments