Comments | gustavolacerda: Rich Text and Argument Maps

gustavolacerda

Rich Text and Argument Maps

Nov 21, 2005 14:48

message I left for Danenberg at Wikisophia:

Rich Text and Argument Maps ( Read more... )

Comments 6

Dynamic Structures danenberg February 16 2006, 02:51:00 UTC

Did I miss your message, Gustavo? In any case, WikiTeX can handle any backend with a CLI, not just LaTeX; would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "dynamic structures?"

Best, Peter

Re: Dynamic Structures danenberg February 16 2006, 10:10:16 UTC

Hello Peter,

Glad to hear from you.

By "dynamic structures" I mean what Ted Nelson means by "not paper-like". PDF documents are paper-like, except (I think) for the fact that you can follow links from them (although this may depend on the viewer).

So by "dynamic structures", I mean something that you can interact with, e.g. things that have multiple possible visualizations (like a file tree whose branches you can expand by clicking on the "+" next to each directory), or a 3D image that the user can rotate.

My idea is that we could encode such structures in a wikitext-like language. Their rendering would require some client-side action, through something like JavaScript.

Gustavo

P.S. I left the message at your user page. How did you end up finding this post?

Re: Dynamic Structures danenberg March 24 2006, 02:14:56 UTC

> Their rendering would require some client-side action, through something like JavaScript.

Interesting; we're already exploring the use of alternate engines with IPA and Greek, where paper-like output shows its limitations.

Have you tried your hand at some code, or is it still in the idea stage?

> How did you end up finding this post?

Google, actually; hence the delay.

Re: Dynamic Structures gustavolacerda March 24 2006, 11:59:12 UTC

Things are very much in the idea stage. I need to work these ideas out, before I can start doing something.

Suppose I want to support file interactively-visualizable trees (see comment above). Would it be a good first step to write a TeX package?

If I do write such an TeX extension, it won't be supported by PDF, since PDF is too paper-like for the purposes of the package, AFAIK.

TeX code using this extension would be better "compiled" by something like LaTeX2Html.

P.S. Don't you use LJ notification? Maybe I should be emailing you instead?

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