mgualt

Would this be useful for an academic research group?

Was this patent filed before or after the head of USPS was installed by the Dear Leader?

Is there a handwritten (stylus) notes software which can be used for this type of linking? I'm not talking about OCR, but handwritten/drawn as default format.

I'd be interested to see a description of the concept behind this -- it looks fun/pretty, but what is the concept and structure?

I'm certainly drawn to the idea and am inclined positively towards it. I'm even willing to overlook the ridiculous hubris of "This new medium will be the way most text is read and written in the future."

However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points:

1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format.

2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer?

3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed?

I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot.

The 2011 video I referenced in my other comment was taken along Coorow-Latham road, in WA, with the same camera motions... Perhaps this one was also taken there?

Interesting utility, and kudos for making it OSS! Something I couldn't help but notice is that it is very similar to a short film which played at TIFF 2011 called "Coorow-Latham Road" by Blake Williams, a 20 minute video work which played in the Wavelengths experimental section of the festival.

A short clip of the video is available here: http://vimeo.com/26850823

Amusingly, the artist has created another version of the video, now that hyperlapse is available: https://vimeo.com/63778677

The original film, Coorow-Latham Road, is edited and manipulated from screenshots of a Google street view road trip along the length of a road in rural Australia. The camera rotates 180 degrees from forward to backward along the 20 minute trip.

This may be a case where art inspires software, which is an interesting phenomenon in itself, or maybe it's a freak coincidence!

This seems to work well -- I imagine I would use it if I were using a temporary computer, an ipad, or some such thing. What would be nice is if I could integrate it with dropbox or similar services, essentially use it to edit and compile files in my dropbox library. Also it would be good to use a standard editor with config files that could be saved to customize the environment.

Thank you for replying - I tried the new branch, and posted the problem I encountered as an issue with gists attached on the github.

I think my fontforge is the current version (see above) -- please correct me if I'm wrong.

Indeed, and I hope it stays out of scope forever. The idea of reflow is anathema to the idea of typesetting, as far as I can see.

yes - it crashes as described with any pdf file.

From my point of view, that's not really tex to html. That's tex markup to html. I am talking about using the latex software, whose purpose is to do typesetting. The amazing thing about this converter is that it takes the latex OUTPUT and produces html.

This is what fontforge displays when I start it up:

Executable based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012-D. Library based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012.

I was able to install

cmake, fontforge and libpoppler with homebrew,

gcc-4.7 using

https://github.com/sol-prog/gcc-4.7-binary

Amazing - I am attempting to install this on mac osx lion -- it is taking a lot of time because of the dependencies. With so many dependencies the probability of failure is very high. Let's hope it works.

I urge you to find a way to allow people to install your software more easily.

I managed to get it to install (after about an hour and a half of tinkering. However I get "Segmentation fault" when I try running it:

pdf2htmlEX --debug=1 test.pdf

temporary dir: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv

Preprocessing: ....

Working: Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__css

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__pages

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/p1.png

Install font: (29 0) -> f1

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/f1.pfa

Segmentation fault: 11

Very interesting - It would be great if the author could outline his overall goals and design ideas.

What are some of the constraints on the PDF in terms of page dimensions or configuration?

How is the math translation done? Does it use MathML or something else?

For me, the interest is that I can now go LaTeX ---> Webpage.

A couple of naive questions about the design of the security system:

1. Why is it possible to do the password tests remotely? Why would the key on the router be allowed to be transmitted? Even a 6 character password should be safe if you don't allow multiple tries.

2. Why isn't the handshake protocol encrypted?

I emphatically disagree.

In creating tutorials, the key is exercising restraint.

This is especially important when dealing with Emacs, which is a classic case of an almost complete lack of restraint concerning the hierarchical organization of features. EmacsWiki is another great example of a huge tangled ball of knots.

Most experts forget exactly how impenetrable a new subject can seem to a beginner. I commend the tutor for not forgetting this!

I find your post interesting, and it goes some way to answering my own questions. However, your post is based on the premise

"There are four issues with decentralized, large-scale sharing of content between non-technical people..."

and you claim those four issues are 1. Identity Persistence 2. Data Persistence 3. Publishing 4. Access Restrictions

I do not see why this is so. But even if it is, it is not even clear if the main point, at this stage, is to identify the atomic components of the "social web" -- perhaps what is sought after now is a slightly higher-level conceptual framework which puts these together.

For example, "publishing" may be missing the point - perhaps we need a finer grained concept: different kinds of collaboration, delegation of authority, distribution of tasks, self-communication, electronic cloud prayer...

I would be interested to read a 'big-picture' description of what Tent is. Forgetting for the moment how it compares with competitors, what is the idea? I read the introduction but I feel that I don't understand it.

From what I can tell, the idea is to create a standard set of objects and rules for interacting with these objects. Of course that is how protocols tend to look.

What are some of the new objects/concepts proposed by Tent? For example, is there a distinction between "home" and "users" akin to server/client? Are there several types of messages, compared to email? Is there a standard cookie-like object? What is the conceptual model for sharing? Any insight would be appreciated.

Researchgate appears to be a private commercial entity, does not charge its users, and is not ad-supported. Private investors are funding the company. I have one main question: what is the business plan? I fear its users are going to be taken for a spin.

I will at least look at Knuth's book, though I doubt I will be able to make it work!

I think you are absolutely right, and this brings us to a daunting challenge -- how to plan and implement the document of the future...

In the TeX output, say the DVI file, we can (I presume, though I don't know any details) find all the information about detailed placement and size of all the characters and diagrams. This is provided in a certain format, according to certain conceptual framework.

On the other hand, the web technologies, including javascript, can theoretically be programmed to respond to such instructions and recreate the same kind of control we get with PDFs, and even go beyond it.

What I wonder is: if we want this kind of inter-operability, what is the crux of the matter? Where precisely does the mapping have to be made?

Thanks for your 2 cents, I "ain't" asking for your "help".

I think it is reasonably self-evident that one doesn't often find webpages with the quality of typesetting that one finds in many printed books.

The TeX environment nowadays has hundreds of specialized packages which provide micro-typography support, programmatic diagrams, advanced mathematical features, detailed cross-referencing, multilanguage support, advanced treatment of fonts including ligatures, linebreaking, justification, character protrusion, grayscale balancing... A cursory glance at the PDFTeX author's thesis work may give an idea of how far the system has evolved:

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf

It is impossible for me to adequately convey the TeX ecosystem in a comment -- you may consider that my question is aimed at people already familiar with it.

Now, I understand that current web technology seems to be improving to the point where, as you say, "you have an underlying engine that arranges text with arbitrary modifications..." So, I am left with the question of whether the TeX ecosystem can somehow be ported completely to create, say, HTML5 documents or something like this, instead of the current PDF output. I am talking about something new - this will not be a PDF, and it will not be a traditional webpage with features such as re-flow or "multi-browser support"... this would be an electronic publication where the author has complete control over the viewing experience. The advantage of this would be the possibility of extending TeX even further, to allow for programmatic control of the reading experience, to include features such as folding, nonlinear document structure, embedded media and code, and many other things I can't even fathom. If the current toolchain does in fact have the capabilities for TeX to be implemented in it - then it would be very interesting to create a plan for how to accomplish this goal in the proper way.

Web layout is nowhere near the kind of typesetting required for professional quality documents and books.

I am aware of mathjax, which is useful for embedding snippets, but this is still far from what I am talking about, which is a complete publishing system such as latex, as is used by publishers for all kinds of documents, but for electronic active documents with features that go beyond those of books and PDF.

Formatting for print? I assume you aren't talking about /actual/ printing on paper... the whole point of my question is that we need a new typesetting system for active and web-enabled electronic documents which provides as much control over the reader experience as PDF does, but is not tied to the print format and has new features which are now possible.

I would be interested to know whether a version of the TeX typesetting program could be implemented in WebGL or some appropriate tool.

I have been seeing a lot more HTML5 demos with unusual placement of fonts and text. So it seems a no-brainer to port TeX to the browser (for many years this was considered impossible for some reason)

I agree with the advice, and I offer some in return about Habari: hire someone to make your demo video non-awful. The "muzak" and slow pacing alone were enough to send me running away from the whole project. A production that aesthetically displeasing is a sure sign of an unappealing product/environment.