How do you get the knowledge from your mind, through a digital information processing device (aka. computer) and allow others to receive this information as close as possible to the original meaning?
This is a long sentence that describes my struggle to write using a computer.
One part is writing logical, interconnected sentences.
The other is structure: Using the existing understanding of the reader to rebuild your knowledge with them.
Then there are aesthetics: It is far easier (for me) to read a well printed, well designed book then reading the average website.
These challenges do not describe the digital format.
It is an entirely different problem and equally important.
So far I have seen and used a range of options:
1) plain ASCII-text (letters a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and a few symbols including punctuation). This doesn't even cover my language. [Now there is UTF-8, which helps a lot.]
2) HTML: basically the attempt to describe everything else as ascii.
ü becomes
ü; It also introduces a mixture of semantic, visual and structural elements (<title> indicates the title of something; <i> means italic font; <table> allows to create a rough tabular structure).
3) LaTeX: A collection of visual commands combined with a mathematical layout engine. Has the potential to create beautiful
books at the cost of very steep learning curve and complexity that cannot be phased.
3) M$ Word, Star-/Open-/LibreOffice: Easy to use, but not capable of producing fine work.
4) M$ Paint / The Gimp / Inkscape: positioning everything yourself. Making a change often means recreating the whole page.
Most of them only focus on the visual representation, but not the actual meaning: The expression
2 to the power of n is represented in HTML by
2<sup>n</sup> capturing only the fact that "n" is superscript. LaTeX woud allow you to write
2^n relying on the current definition of the command
^.
Then there often different visualizations of the same object. Which one is best, is often hard to determine: A wave could be represented by a still picture, an animation or a sound. The different parts of a landscape on a map (water/land, elevation, soil type, ...) could be visualized by color, fill patterns, line patterns, numbers, text, animations, sound. Which ones are appropriate differs between a huge printed map, a computer monitor, mobile phone or braille screen. Color vision, background noise and limitations in interaction are also important.
How do you deal with this?
I even made an attempt to create a format myself… and got to the limits of my skills in mathematics.
