Maybe markdown isn't good enough. My experience using it for long form wasn't great.
Maybe AsciiDoc and something like #alexandria is the way?
I created nostr:nprofile1qqsd73mzgj7jsd7kjwwrzl36jskmjgkknpkh9akjjz60tzvadqzwgkqpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsky8trd to show how much things are fucked but I'm having a hard time to find even a minute to work on all this (devs plz do something lol)
Discussion
Markdown is fantastic. I guess the issue is that none of the long-form devs is a writer themselves (or a markdown enthusiast), hence support is flaky
...AsciiDoc is cool but it has its own issues, and is not very readable without being parsed
Do you mind, if I port your stuff over to Alexandria?
Like, publish 21 Lessons as a book?
What do you think nostr:nprofile1qqs8lft0t45k92c78n2zfe6ccvqzhpn977cd3h8wnl579zxhw5dvr9qpzemhxue69uhkvun9deejumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6qgdwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkcqghwaehxw309anxjmr5v4ezumn0wd68ytnhd9hx2aezugp , nostr:nprofile1qqs8qy3p9qnnhhq847d7wujl5hztcr7pg6rxhmpc63pkphztcmxp3wgpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgmwaehxw309a6xsetxdaex2um59ehx7um5wgcjucm0d5hsz9nhwden5te0dehhxarjv4kxjar9wvhx7un89uqaujaz and nostr:nprofile1qqs2js6wu9j76qdjs6lvlsnhrmchqhf4xlg9rvu89zyf3nqq6hygt0spz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qghwaehxw309aex2mrp0yhxummnw3ezucnpdejz7qg4waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxgctdw4eju6t09uygje4n? I'd give it some elegant Asciidoc and then we could hone the .CSS in our clients, to make it look pretty.
YES! I'm working on improved book support and rendering so this would be perfect to test.
Yeah, that's motivating test data, since lots of Nostriches would click on it.
Let's maybe wait to announce until all three renderings are done and then make a joint announcement. Maybe add a screencast of each display in the announcement.
Proof of interop.
First rule of #bookclub:
Interop 💪
There needs to be at least one topic where the stuff actually works.
I think this is the first intra-project team that actually manages to successfully coordinate.
We're trying to get the same for relays, but it's been a bit like herding cats. 😅
Sounds good!
Working on the pretty #asciidoc part today 🫡
Book widget is for next week.
This would be a good test case for our styling.
The license brings up an interesting point. Is there a way we can link the license to every event that makes up the book? If users can work with individual sections of the book in isolation, the license should be attached to those as well as to the whole.
Please do!
21 Lessons is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, as is my other work. That means that you are free to share, adapt, and translate the material as you see fit. The only requirement is that you must distribute your contributions under the same license. https://21lessons.com/translations
I'd love to help.
Hey, sure. I'm going to need someone to proofread the upload, to make sure I didn't skip a chapter, by accident, or screw up the formatting or something wonky like that.
We're still building the automated, intelligent proof-reader. It's still completely manual. Someone just scrolling down the page and looking to see if something looks strange. 🙈
I'll @ you with the draft upload, later today.
About ⅔ of the way through. Should be done, tomorrow. I see, now, that it really would be nearly impossible to get it all straight with Markdown. Need finer granularity on the tags.
I think some of the hyperlinks are broken. Probably all need to be tested. Maybe you could do that, too.
GN, for now.
Okay, first draft is up. Lots of the formatting is not rendering, so we'll have to work on that. (nostr:npub1wqfzz2p880wq0tumuae9lfwyhs8uz35xd0kr34zrvrwyh3kvrzuskcqsyn nostr:npub107jk7htfv243u0x5ynn43scq9wrxtaasmrwwa8lfu2ydwag6cx2quqncxg nostr:npub149p5act9a5qm9p47elp8w8h3wpwn2d7s2xecw2ygnrxqp4wgsklq9g722q )
https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/publication?d=21-lessons-by-der-gigi-v-1
You can see the specific Asciidoc tags I used here
nostr:npub1cn670f663n3ks02jnnlsvd5y88zjnefy8343ykaxs7y3nzzketrsrjwt8a I'd be really grateful, if you could proof-read that and give me back a list of the messed up formatting and broken links. Thank you in advance.
This will be a great test case for improving our stylesheets!
The formatting is a real doozy. 😅 Gigi decided to not make this easy on us. But, it will be very elegant, I think, once we get it all straightened out.
I tried to maintain the linkage, but with less "jumping out" of the flow of the main passages, so that it isn't distracting on an e-paper reader.
Competition is on 😉
I've got some time today and so will take a run.
How best to feedback?
I also need to learn more about the approach here as seems NOSTR adjacent. Seems to remember a parallel NIP repo or something?
Feedback here, please. Keeps it out of the kind 01 feed and means I can find it, easily.
If you click on the embedded note with my "Testerin" pic on it, the nevent json opens.
The two links in the main issue will always go to the newest nevent, so each draft will have a new one, but the top links won't change because the d-tag and the naddr don't change.
I can just include your license version in the Title Page event.
I was planning on doing this, anyway, as I know it would be popular for Nostriches to highlight and stuff.
Markdown is just really bad for books. Need need something like Asciidoc, that maximizes the ePUB formatting capabilities.
You think Markdown is fantastic because most markdown editors als include HTML and other junk into the converter. You can't see how much they have to "fix" and "add", on their part. That's why it ports so badly from one website to another.
Can't even resize an image with Markdown.
That was my experience.
Injected some simple HTML for formatting and that was then butchered in different ways by different clients.
I love markdown for notes, wikis, etc. but for anything that needs to look pretty it falls short imo.
We're not going to kill Medium with Markdown.
yeah, i'm 100% in support of asciidoc as the preferred format, it's a complete and sane syntax... i'd describe it as being like the PostScript of graphical text rendering, and of course it can flatten down to paper as well, i think it does it even better than html as used in epub
i can't see myself printing stuff very much, and if any, it would have to be laser or dye sub for durability, but this is a nice feature
Yes, it's designed specifically to generate e-books (hence the sectioning and doc metadata structure with author, version, etc.), but allows you to have the middle step of rendering as HTML. Very elegant solution, IMO.
I hate Markdown for wikis. I tend to write academic wiki articles and THE TABLE FORMATTING FROM HELL HAUNTS MY DREAMS. 😱😅
Lots of wiki pages contain tables that are actually images, and I totally get it.
Of course, then you can't resize those images, or determine the horizontal placement, so it's just moving from one problem to the next.
Oh, I know. Support by clients is still abysmal though. Doesn't even support stuff that's part of the very original spec.
I occasionally write long-form articles, but I've been republishing them in my blog on #Alexandria.
I'm eventually only going to write them directly there, but it doesn't have kind 1111 comments and highlights, yet, and some styling is still being added, so that's what I'm waiting for.
I understand that. Most people don't write books though, they write articles.
Even for articles I found it wanting - or at least I found consistent client implementation wanting.
I want to port all my stuff to nostr, I really do. But with the current state of things I can't. That's how bad it is lol
Yeah, but we've opened up the possibility of doing it like I do, where you create a magazine event and steadily add articles to it, as you write them. Once you have a large enough collection of articles, you could print it as a book.
Then they appear, as you write them, as articles, and also appear in your compendium of articles.