Hi,
First Hans, is really nice to read your interaction here. We need
"newbies" like you. I'm kind of an "old eternal newbie" on Leo, using it
more and more, but without proper knowledge of python or proper
meaningful context to modify it. I'm also primarily a teacher/researcher
and now I believe that I need to create that meaningful context by
making my students to use more Leo explicitly. I tried once before but
installation of a non-stable version went wrong and I have not a
compelling user story yet to create that context with my undergrad
students. Now I have it. I'm writing myself my Ph.D thesis with Leo and
my students are primary post-graduate students who are also writing
their thesis. So I plan to teach solve with them how to create a
Personal Learning Environment[1] which includes Leo as a tool for their
thesis and so they can take advantage of the several layers of depth
that a tool like Leo can bring to the writing experience and export
their work in common formats like pdf or libreoffice's. Because their
context is different of mine (they primary use Windows and I use
Gnu/Linux) this gap creates a proper teaching/learning opportunity for
us. I think that we're alike in our interest with teaching, writing and
a non-programmer background, and of course, we have differences also. I
would like to comment your post taking that into account.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_learning_environment
On 12/10/11 17:59, HansBKK wrote:
I realize my needs are edge cases relative to the current typical Leo
user, but ATM I'm looking at it as a black box, a processing and
organizing tool **between* the specific endpoints outlined at the end
of this post. At every point in it's journey from one stage to the
next, the data must remain (a huge pile of) lightly marked-up
plaintext.
For me lightly marked-up text is also the key for data sharing and
editing with other people who are not Leo users. I would prefer txt2tags
markup over others because of lightness and easiness to learn and to
create custom exporters, but the of support for references (footnotes,
biographical data and others) keep me in reStructuredText which is still
nice with some minor glitches solved by Leo (like underline as a markup
indicator). So reST will be my format for writing text in various
infrastructures and exporting from it to several formats That being
said, the more I live in Leo, the more I see plain text with markup and
files in general as a "degradation" of the meta-structure that Leo
provides to the plain files world. Now I'm trying to add even more
structure to that flat-word with Leo + Fossil. The first one gives files
flat word structure in space, the second one in time. I don't see myself
going back to flat world, but I know that I need to communicate with
people who is still there, so I degrade the Leo metastructure to this
kind of minimal comfortable standard for communication.
My goal is to recognize that both myself and Leo won't be around one
day, to create a knowledge management/processing system contingent on
the working premise that either or both can disappear **at any given
point in time** without affecting the "fully open and transparent"
nature of the data itself; it should remain at every stage fully
accessible and usable to other relatively non-technical writers/
readers/editors/format-processors, and whatever common tools they are
familiar with.
[...]
I **do not** want Leo's XML to become "yet another storage format" for
anything other than temporary working data for a specific transform
process, because then the usability of the data itself becomes
dependent on that specific tool. I would also prefer use relatively
simple and open transform methods
My approach is different. I think that Leo, like Smalltalk, is trying to
solve a fundamental problem in dealing with computers and both will be
around for long time (well Leo has a less prominent users/mind-share so
it could be less likely to survive, but I don't think so). The problem
is that most people see or use the "degraded" flat world. And that
brings a related problem: how to communicate with that world and how to
make more people use and understand the meta-structure of non-flat world
and move to that place. Trying to put metadata on flat-world and make
connections on it, would be almost as reinventing Leo or xml (which, by
the way I don't like either) or adding a lot of helper files to put
metastructure in flat files, and still you would lose the viewing
capabilities of trees, seeing only the "flat leafs of files". So how
that potential users who would come after you or me, and who are
unfamiliar with Leo will deal with the advantages that Leo provides
while make connections with their tools/data? This for me is related
with the context where that users will find Leo and that possible
connections. The immediate one for me is the classes of next semester in
which I will try to make a better encounter of new Leo users and develop
that potential and document the experience. I have thought in future
problems/opportunities of this scenario, this are some of them:
a. Installing Leo, which is specially difficult for non-programmers like
my students. I will try to prepare my classes dealing previously with
that problems using alternative installing strategies not found here
until now like pyinstaller[2] and/or Zero Install[3]
[2] http://www.pyinstaller.org/
[3] http://0install.net/
b. Integration with external file systems, specially the ones that
produce pdf output like LaTeX/MikTeK or rst2pdf and the ones that deal
with versions; for that one I will use fossil SCM.
I imagine a world where deconstructing textual computer interaction the
Leo way would be the standard. We're far away, specially with Leo
self-fulfilled prophesy of being a developer's tool for developers, but
carrying Leo to new contexts will be a way to explore the path to
futures like that one.
I will keep you posted.
Cheers,
Offray
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