by napsternxg on 10/20/23, 1:00 AM with 214 comments
by wcrichton on 10/20/23, 5:10 AM
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
- How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: 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/
Also: the next version of Nota will be written 99% in Rust :-)
by jxf on 10/20/23, 2:21 AM
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.
by kstrauser on 10/20/23, 1:39 AM
* 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".
by promiseofbeans on 10/20/23, 4:41 AM
by nologic01 on 10/20/23, 9:38 AM
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.
by zellyn on 10/20/23, 3:36 AM
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.
by esafak on 10/20/23, 2:24 AM
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.
by kimi on 10/20/23, 4:47 AM
by daitangio on 10/20/23, 7:19 AM
I thing Emacs org-mode is better and less Javascript-dependant. Also https://docusaurus.io/ is very nice and flexible.
I suggest to look at these two to extend nota in similar way
by zaptheimpaler on 10/20/23, 3:52 AM
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?
by zelphirkalt on 10/20/23, 4:58 PM
by epgui on 10/20/23, 2:25 AM
I strongly disagree in the general case. PDFs all the way.
by adastra22 on 10/20/23, 1:22 AM
by johnchristopher on 10/20/23, 8:54 AM
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).
by BuboBubo on 10/20/23, 11:20 AM
- Pandoc Markdown and Pandoc : https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html
- PagedJS : 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
by runeks on 10/20/23, 7:41 AM
> 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?
by politelemon on 10/20/23, 2:45 AM
by Brajeshwar on 10/20/23, 2:50 AM
by dcchambers on 10/23/23, 11:29 AM
by auggierose on 10/20/23, 5:04 AM
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.
}
by dang on 10/20/23, 2:46 AM
Nota: A Document Language for the Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31348316 - May 2022 (55 comments)
by cryptos on 10/20/23, 6:16 AM
by FridgeSeal on 10/20/23, 5:23 AM
> * 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.
by lagniappe on 10/20/23, 2:46 AM
by 38 on 10/20/23, 4:34 AM
by mppowers on 10/20/23, 3:27 AM
by maegul on 10/20/23, 4:25 AM
Though it’s a platform, there’s a runtime and some open substitutes for the bits not open IIRC.
by wiz21c on 10/20/23, 9:51 AM
by rmrfchik on 10/20/23, 8:45 AM
by agileAlligator on 10/20/23, 5:35 AM
by lloydatkinson on 10/21/23, 7:47 AM
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.
by classified on 10/20/23, 5:08 AM
by amelius on 10/20/23, 9:55 AM
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.
by choeger on 10/20/23, 4:10 PM
by eimrine on 10/20/23, 6:47 AM
by max_ on 10/20/23, 6:38 AM
by cmovq on 10/20/23, 6:34 PM
> 1. npm install --global @nota-lang/nota
That's going to be a showstopper for a lot of people.
by rufius on 10/20/23, 4:04 PM
by bigbuppo on 10/22/23, 10:19 AM
by slmjkdbtl on 10/20/23, 3:25 AM