Thank you for asking! I have added a new page https://try.perm.pub/tools/ to answer half-ish of your questions. I'll answer below in this message too.
On Monday, November 6, 2023 at 3:43:50 AM UTC-5 Guillaume Dehaene wrote:
After spending 15mins reading through the doc at try.perm.pub and the "manifesto" on perm.pub itself, I'm still a bit confused about some of the key details of the project:
- what exactly is the overarching aim? As far as I can tell, this constructs an arxiv-like structure of versioning for technical documents, but hosting is decentralized (perm.pub only hosts links?) ?
"Decentralized arxiv-like hosting" is a good description. For those familiar with PubMed Central, I like the playful name "PubMe Decentral". But I've avoided the term "decentralized" for a variety of reasons.
Regarding overarching aim, I'm not sure at what level or time scale to answer that question. Similar to how for HTML I have a hard time answering what is HTML's overarching aim.
- what formats can I use to author to perm.pub? Having read the two latex based examples, I guess latex works, but can I do markdown?
Realistically, I would stick to either LaTeX or Markdown, at least for now. Those are the two source formats I am using.
Can I do quarto (an opinionated extension of pandoc markdown,
www.quarto.org )?
I have not started testing and using Quarto but I plan to before the end of the year. Quarto will probably work well.
Can I do docx / openofficewrite like some teams like to do? since I know this is based on pandoc, I guess it's going to be somewhat flexible, but with restrictions at some key points.
I have tested generating a Baseprint snapshot from a LibreOffice doc, thanks to Pandoc, but I doubt many will find this approach satisfactory. I might be biased because I generally avoid word processors. My hunch is that if somebody likes using a word processor, they probably will find this tech in its current state too user-unfriendly. But in the future, maybe it will be different.
If anybody would like to be a be a trial user of using a word processor for baseprints, I'm more than happy to help collaborate. We can document in what ways this tech falls short of being user-friendly enough, which I suspect it does.