[HN Gopher] Show HN: Stempad - Fast Online Scientific Writing
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Show HN: Stempad - Fast Online Scientific Writing
I'm building an online text-editor editor to write and save
scientific documents fast. Here's a video of how it works:
https://youtu.be/Hyk8CvCdEWE As an engineering student, I hated
that handwriting was the only viable way to do fast or impromptu
scientific writing. It would be the only way to take quick notes in
class or in a lab, write an assignment, or create a presentation.
Here's a few things I witnessed in academia: * Unsuitable editors:
Students attempt to resort to text editors unoptimized for science,
such as Notion or Word, to take notes and write assignments. *
Slow or expensive software: Students, teachers, and researchers
using high-friction and high-cost tools for writing * Messy class
notes: Professors upload pictures of hastily handwritten class
notes as supplementary material The list could go on. I believe
that the ability to quickly document scientific ideas with a
keyboard would be a huge QOL improvement for anyone learning or
doing science. I recently launched the ability to export Stempad
documents to LaTex. I tested it by rewriting part of a paper I
found online (Metabolic scaling in small life forms by Marc E.
Ritchie & Christopher P. Kempes) and exporting it. You can try the
editor and export yourself using the post url. The export button is
on the top right of the page. In case you want to see the result
directly, this was it:
https://www.overleaf.com/read/zjccqbjdyhtc#6e146c Feedback is
really appreciated! If anyone thinks they might find Stempad
useful, let me know and I'd love to get in touch.
Author : ralph_r
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-07-28 22:54 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stempad.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stempad.io)
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| In resulted pdf there're weird spacings all over the document.
| Figures are referenced by manually indexing them rather by name.
| No hyperlinks. Equations have no numbering. Some
| equations/formulas in text aren't using math mode. (For units
| better use the siunitx package.) Bibliography is basically simple
| text rather generated, making it hard to switch to other styles.
|
| Regarding the editor, seems math and text cannot be written
| together. Copying math and pasting to text field results in
| pasting LaTeX code.
|
| Now if just said made this because wanted to wouldn't have
| mentioned it, but as you provide a reasoning, LyX (LaTeX
| frontend) and TeXmacs (not frontend but can export to LaTeX)
| provide a way to get LaTeX documents without writing LaTeX.
|
| Overall the site can function as cool math-enabled notepad but
| (for now at least) seems hard to use it as platform to author
| papers.
| ralph_r wrote:
| Hey! The LaTeX feature is still brand new and I'm looking on
| improving it, thanks for the feedback. The PDF export seems to
| be misinterpreting the code blocks, I'll have a fix out
| tonight! (Edit: done!)
|
| I would describe it as more than a math-enabled notepad with
| support for 6 other scientific block types and the ability to
| run code. However, I agree that it's definitely not built to
| write full blown scientific papers at this stage :)
| curiousgibbon wrote:
| Have you heard of pandoc?
| ralph_r wrote:
| I have not. At a glance, it seems really useful if someone
| needs to have plaintext documents be able to export to many
| different formats.
| tomtranter wrote:
| My biggest frustration as an academic was reproducibility of
| papers I was reading. The pdf is such a useless medium for
| information transfer and the academic publishing industry is a
| complete racket where all the value is generated by the authors
| and reviewers who work for free and have to pay (in most cases)
| to have their work accessible freely to the public. I would love
| to see this turn into a default way to publish papers
| hoosieree wrote:
| If you're lucky, someone releases code+data associated with
| their published paper. If you're really lucky, that code and
| data is in the same state as it was in the published paper. If
| you're really really lucky, someone besides the author can get
| it to run.
|
| If you can consistently locate and run academic publication
| code without direct help from the authors, you are The Chosen
| One.
|
| [edit]
|
| In seriousness, reproducibility is also my biggest concern.
| Scientific/academic publishing could do a lot better than
| rendering pretty static documents - we can provide the data,
| code, version control, and build processes which produced the
| paper so anyone can reproduce what they see in the paper. AND
| we could host them together so they're bidirectionally linked,
| to facilitate other scientists building on top of our work.
|
| That _could_ be our future, with the right incentive structures
| in place.
| jbl0ndie wrote:
| Isn't that the idea (or perhaps the promise) of languages
| like R or notebook tools like Jupyter or Collab, which
| provide a means to ingest, clean, analyse and present your
| data, then share the code you've used to do that.
| jononor wrote:
| I like notebooks, they are a useful tool. But they are just
| a slight adjustment to the programming model and an
| alternative type IDE. It does not do much in terms of
| helping reproducibility. Data, software and dependency
| versioning is much more important. And verification that
| the code indeed runs on another machine, and produces the
| correct results. Setting up CI for the project, and basic
| end2end tests is the minimum level I set for my research
| (in applied machine learning).
| rrnechmech wrote:
| We don't need _faster_ scientific writing
|
| We need _slower_ scientific writing.
|
| Edit: While I understand policy involved, apologies, I'd contend
| 'shallow'. Not lengthy? Sure. But the point was made enough @kbk
| et al. got it
| aio2 wrote:
| Ouch, straight to the point.
| kbk wrote:
| For reference http://slow-science.org/
|
| > We are scientists. We don't blog. We don't twitter. We take
| our time.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is good that the actual scientists aren't going to do this
| task.
|
| It is a shame that we've more or less given up on the idea of
| having science communicators to do that job.
|
| IMO when journalism ended the worst side-effect was that
| people who would be otherwise employed actually doing things
| have had to start blogging about the fact that they were
| doing them, instead of actually doing them.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
| ralph_r wrote:
| I totally get where you're coming from, maybe I could have
| worded the title differently. In contexts such as publishing
| scientific papers and journals, patience and attention to
| detail are really important.
|
| There are however many other contexts where I would argue speed
| and a simple UX makes a big difference.
|
| * Notes that need to be taken on the fly: class notes, lab
| notes, field observations, general notes
|
| * Prototyping, brainstorming, ideation sessions, especially
| collaborative ones
|
| * Drafting outlines
|
| * Creating presentations on work you've already completed
|
| * Doing schoolwork, such as assignments or lab reports
|
| * Creating teaching material on content material you're a
| subject matter expert in
|
| That's a few examples but there are plenty more. The goal isn't
| to rush the scientific process. The goal is to have a tool that
| doesn't get in your way and enables speed-of-thought writing
| for science. This can be helpful in many ways, especially for
| students, but also for scientists.
| cl3misch wrote:
| I think you are very right. I have been missing a "simple" UI
| for digital scientific notes and your project looks great.
| Less for documentation or papers maybe, more as a tool of
| thought or impromptu communication. Or both, who knows.
|
| During my Master's or PhD I would have agreed with the "slow
| science" sentiments here. These days I want to get things
| done and work with collaborators.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Another way to put this while avoiding the slow/fast argument
| is that the tools for note-taking should not hobble you.
|
| That is, stempad is a blow against _artificially_ slow
| writing, not against _all_ slow writing.
|
| It ideally doesn't keep you from thinking deeply and may help
| if it lets you avoid thinking about the tool instead of the
| content.
| iknownthing wrote:
| Is it possible to embed the stempad editor in something like a
| react app?
| ralph_r wrote:
| Only with an iframe at the moment unless I open source the
| editor at some point.
| hruzgar wrote:
| if you want this to go main stream, you have to at least make
| some parts of it open source
| jopizio wrote:
| Very nice work. I'll definitely play around with it. For the use
| case of a digital lab notebook, it would be nice to be able to
| annotate (superimpose drawings, highlight, etc.) images and pdfs
| directly in the editor. This would be even more powerful if such
| annotations could be grouped or locked, so that their position
| relative to the annotated image remains fixed. This is something
| that all other note taking apps either miss entirely or implement
| poorly (or maybe there's something else out there that does this
| well?). Is this possible in Stempad, or are you considering
| adding such functionality?
| ralph_r wrote:
| Glad to hear you're interesting in trying it. For your use
| case, I'm curious, are you referring to general use annotations
| (ex. highlighting, text boxes, commenting, drawing), or are you
| specifically interested in scientific annotations (ex. Adding
| an annotation with math or code in it)?
|
| Regardless, it's definitely a realistic feature to have. I'm
| thinking of it as a block right now, perhaps a file block, that
| can be resized and annotated freely. Maybe annotations can be
| mini, floating, moveable and resizable editors. Would that make
| a big difference for you?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > I hated that handwriting was the only viable way to do fast or
| impromptu scientific writing.
|
| > Messy class notes: Professors upload pictures of hastily
| handwritten class notes as supplementary material
|
| Off-topic: What state of the art open source methods of doing
| handwriting OCR?
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I've always been confused by these takes because it seems to me
| that the effort spent reviewing and organizing the original
| less-organized version of lecture notes is precisely when I
| learn the most.
|
| But to your question about OCR, I'd like to extend it with
| another question? Is there a fundamental difference between the
| OCR that we might use to solve a caption or read a street sign
| versus the technology to OCR a paragraph of prose?
| arsalanb wrote:
| Is the Python code executing via Pyodide in the browser?
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