Forester, a tool for scientific and mathematical hypertexts

原始链接: https://www.forester-notes.org/index/index.xml

Forester simplifies tree creation in your forest by automatically generating .tree files in the 'trees' folder. Use `forester new forest.toml --dest=trees` to create a new tree with the next sequential address, or use `--random` for randomized addresses, helpful for collaborative forests. Forester outputs the new tree's location (e.g., trees/0002.tree). New trees initially contain only a creation date in their metadata. Add further metadata, including a lowercase title and the address of the author's biographical tree. Multiple authors can be declared. After metadata, populate the tree with content using the Forester markup language. Aim for independent and atomic tree structures. Remember the initial date field is meant to record the date of the tree's creation. You can add multiple dates to track updates.

A Hacker News post discusses Forester, a new tool for creating scientific and mathematical hypertexts (forester-notes.org). The tool aims to simplify the creation of tag-based knowledge bases, addressing the challenges and "bitrot" associated with older software clusters like Gerby, which is used by projects like Stacks and Kerodon. A commenter highlights a manifesto-like sentiment about the Web suffering from pop-up ads, SEO content farms, and LLM-generated "slop," thus motivating the need for better tools. The commenter sees Forester-like projects, focused on building knowledge graphs, as a potentially good fit, despite the perceived complexities of TeX (compared to WYSIWYG editors). They acknowledge that TeX may be cumbersome to write directly, but powerful for layout, and essential for more advanced markdown applications.

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原文

Creating a new tree in your forest is as simple as adding a .tree file to the trees folder. Because it is hard to manually choose the next incremental tree address, Forester provides a command to do this automatically:

forester new forest.toml --dest=trees

In return, Forester should output the location of the new tree, e.g. trees/0002.tree. If we look at the contents of this new file, we will see that it is empty except for metadata assigning a date to the tree:

You may prefer to use randomised addresses over sequential addresses; this can be particularly useful if multiple people are contributing to a forest. In that case, pass the --random option to forester new.

Most trees should have a annotation; this date is meant to be the date of the tree's creation; you can have more than one date, if you like to keep track of when a tree has been updated. You should proceed by adding further metadata: the title and the author; for the latter, you will use the address of your personal biographical tree.

Tree titles should be given in lower case (except for proper names, etc.); these titles will be rendered by Forester in sentence case. A tree can have as many declarations as it has authors; these will be rendered in their order of appearance. Now you can begin to populate the tree with its content, written in the Forester markup language. Think carefully about keeping each tree relatively independent and atomic.