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by wolverine876 1506 days ago
Thank you. Would Jupyter be a good comparision (though that isn't prose-oriented)? Maybe even Emacs? What users are you targeting? Developers usually don't need to write a lot of prose.

I'm always interested in systems that are willing to make the tradeoff of more power and sophistication at the cost of a greater learning curve, and I strongly agree that we need something beyond PDFs and webpages (and Word documents). Nota interests me but I'm having a hard time seeing how the power and sophistication will significantly improve my writing or documents (and I don't develop React applications). A use case would be great; the hyperlinks and tooltips on the page I see can be done much more simply.

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I'm targeting people who are writing documents: bloggers, academics, textbook writers, that sort of thing. Certainly Nota requires a level of technical expertise to use right now, but I have a WYSIWYG editor as a distant-future TODO.

If you read my original paper about Nota, you can find a more interesting set of applications: https://willcrichton.net/nota/

Ah, thank you. That paper makes a lot more sense to me, describing a clear problem. For others:

The principal question underlying this work is: how much effort does it take to understand a PL paper?

and

Papers about programming languages involve complex notations, systems, and proofs. Static PDFs offer little support in understanding such concepts. I describe Nota, a framework for academic papers that uses the browser's interactive capabilities to support comprehension in context. Nota uses hover effects, tooltips, expandable sections, toggleable explanations, and other interactions to help readers understand a language's syntax and semantics.