Markup Languages and Note Taking/Meeting Notes 2017-10-16

Date: Monday, 16 October 2017 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm; (Thanksgiving! Scheduled for the 2nd non-holiday Monday of the month)
Event Announcement: https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/243068343/
Location: Communitech Jelly Bean Room 1st Floor, 151 Charles Street West, Kitchener, Ontario Map

How do you take notes? What software exists for note taking? What markup language is best for taking notes? Are your notes available on your phone or tablet? How do you synchronize them? How do you publish your notes online? When is it better to use a Note Taking application rather than a proper Word Processor?

This month we invite all the devotees of MarkDown, WikiText, MoinMoin, YAML, and LaTeX to contribute to the discussion at our round table.

--Marc Paré & Bob Jonkman

Markup Languages and Note Taking/Meeting Notes 2017-10-16

Resources

Note-taking applications

Xpad https://launchpad.net/xpad
MATE Desktop Sticky Notes http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/applications

Markup Languages

Markup Editors

Atom.io https://atom.io/

On creating a standard Markup Language:

Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Meeting Notes

Practices

Bob edits notes directly into MediaWiki
Steve's practice is to separate content from form
- Create content first, but in a way that it's easy to add formatting stuff later on
  - WordProcessing doesn't do that, tries to do them both
  - WP tries to be an operating system
  - On all principles, WP are bad
  - But LibreOffice tries to fix that, its internal format is not proprietary
  - Valuable for
- When writing, be concerned primarily with content, secondarily with syntax, format
  - Can always add typographical content (the markup) afterwards
- eg. Wordcount isn't really needed, can't do it accurately with
- Steve uses his own markup, similar to Markdown, related to groff
  - Only worries about paragraph breaks and lists, maybe section headers
  - Does not want ML to interpret line breaks, unless there's two in a row
  - Always works in Linux, so LF only
- Steve uses AWK script to render text,
  - But how to apply markup to a previous line?

Kirk managed documentation in SGML using James Clark's DSSSL processor called "Jade" to generate RTF, TeX,
- DSSSL ==
- James Clark also wrote groff, modelled on SoftQuad troff
- Schema for SGML was DocBook
- None of which gave the results, so he used
- DocBook in XML
- Kirk wrote a stylesheet in XSLT to turn DocBook into XML for LibreOffice
  - "compiled" documentation, literally using "make"

How is a "schema" different from the ML?
- SGML and XML are serialization formats, taking data and turning it into one long stream of characters
- DocBook and DITA are schemas that specifiy the allowable data elements eg, a DTD in HTML or SGML
- XSLTProc using DocBook stylesheets to render HTML

What is the format that uses separate lines for markup, eg.

Heading
=======

Subheading
----------

Requirements

SGML and HTML and XML aren't meant for writing, but for semantic meaning
- More of an interchange format
- Editors need to be for getting content into the editor quickly
- Choose an editor or Markup Language for "pretty", how it appears
- or choose an editor/ML for semantic meaning

Future topics

Scripting languages

Markup Languages and Note Taking/Meeting Notes 2017-10-16

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