New scientific markup language | Hacker News Reader

New scientific markup language

hackpad.com

28 pointsluu19 comments

For me, because I usually don't have to write a full fledged paper, only short math articles.

I use Pandoc + pandoc-citeproc + mathjax and a Haskell code to make it more useful for writing math on the web. (basically, define theorem enviroments, and allow one to refer to theorems from before) https://github.com/Mgccl/blog/blob/master/mathdoc.hs

It is almost good enough, the only problem is there is no way to number the sections and refer to sections. Note it can be fixed in the output side.

An example: http://www.chaoxuprime.com/posts/2014-03-08-even-cycle-in-a-...

Seconding the pandoc approach. I've written articles in markdown (+citeproc) and then used pandoc to convert to LaTeX or MS Word. Easy, clean and elegant. I think it provides all the things that these people want, without needing to reinvent the wheel or make yet-another-markup language.

So the consensus is that LaTeX is perfect, except that it's complex and hard to use. What's the evidence that recreating LaTeX from scratch will lead to something simpler?

My idea is to add one more layer, rather than recreate it from scratch. Many things in LaTeX are wonderful and would be hard to recreate.

Bear in mind that LaTeX itself is a layer to TeX.

So evaluate some of the existing 'one more layers' rather than inventing your own one of those.

A discussion of new scientific markup that doesn't mention org-mode is, IMO, skipping the background research.

Not that org-mode necessarily solves your problem, but it is the center of mass of a pretty substantial research publication community.

So feel free to add. It is a collaborative discussion.

What is the significance of this?

It's something I would love to have, and that I've thought about myself. However, I'd love if someone sees into this hackpad more than a list of wishes by a group of folks.

Is this group of folks notorious for solving and shipping problems of this kind?

This seems more like an ad for hackpad.com than it is about a new markup language for science.

Is there any way to view this with the collaborative features disabled? As it is the page is unusably slow in my browser.

Click "settings" in the top right then "print": https://hackpad.com/ep/pad/static/utAjFcYuvvB

Author here (or rather - people who started this collaborative Hackpad).

1. As for any use of Markdown, it is aimed at short notes and things which are (and should be) more lightweight than full LaTeX (to make them easily editable + make it possible to have them as webpages, etc).

2. Open collaborative pads: I enjoyed a lot collaborative discussions, where anyone can edit. Most of the time results were wonderful (and for this pad, up to 8h ago, it was great). I was both sad and disgusted to see an anus instead of the content (as I see it takes only 2 malicious users among a few dozens to spoil the experience). I reverted them and set some moderation options.

Why the fuck are there pictures of an open anus and dick?

probably because the page was cross-linking to images on another host, and the admin of that host switched the images.

edit: this is called "goatse" btw. Don't google it.

I'm not familiar with HackPad, but I don't think that's what's happening, because the `img` tags point directly to goatse.info. I think someone edited the document, removed whatever content was once there, and replaced it with goatse pics. That's a shame, because I was interested in reading the article.

Reverted to the previous version.

That's why we cannot have good things. People ruining someone else's work just for fun. That was not smart nor funny, and the goatse belongs to 90's.

I was appalled too. The price of making it open for anyone to edit. I reverted them; sadly, because of time zone differences, it took some time.

That was hard to read.

Static version: https://gist.github.com/stared/a4bdf65afa1e37fa39ac

Reply on news.ycombinator.com