I've just finished my first cut at a tutorial for using #Forester, my tool for developing Stacks-like online Zettelkästen, reference books, and lecture notes for scientists, mathematicians, and students.

Title: “Build your own Stacks Project in 10 minutes”
URL: https://www.jonmsterling.com/jms-0052.xml

Some exciting upgrades to #Forester coming in v2.2: https://www.jonmsterling.com/jms-005V.xml

(Might need to unload your browser cache, as some of the XSL templates have changed. Annoying!)

Now added table of contents navigation to #Forester. This was possible in userland at the level of XSLT, so no change to the tool was necesssary.

I intentionally spent a lot of time writing about the general principles and constraints governing the design of #ToolsForMathematicalThought without actually writing about the tool that I was creating. I am now ready to proceed from the general to the particular, and am beginning to write about how to use Forester to start your own Stacks Project in ten minutes.

The new version of my Forest is now deployed: https://forest.jonmsterling.com

It is a little more rudimentary as I haven't ported over some of the old features (including nice mouseover displays showing notation provenance, etc.) but I will add those in the coming days/weeks.

What is new is mostly under the hood; the long-and-short of it is that Markdown has been replaced with a much better-behaved macro-friendly markup language of my own design, and the unholy mixture of tools (my own utility ++ Hugo) is replaced by a single monolithic utility that builds everything from end-to-end, about 20-30X faster than the old thing.

The output format is XML, and the XML is transformed to HTML by your browser using an XSL stylesheet. I forgot about that technology, but it turned out to be exactly the right thing for this application.

By the way, loading and scrolling pages is much more snappy because all the macros are expanded statically before being passed to KaTeX; it happens that macro expansion in KaTeX or MathJax is slow enough to bring the browser to a halt.

Plenty of progress today on rendering the pages, metadata, etc. for the successor to my Forest. #ToolsForMathematicalThought

I have been working on a new macro-friendly markup language to replace Markdown in my Forest, and in conjunction with that project, developing an OCaml tool to render the Forest from end-to-end --- which will avoid a lot of the pain of the current version, which uses Hugo. In order to actually get ready to use this, I had to write a compiler from Markdown to my new markup language, since I have more than hundred pages of work and I'm not going to rewrite it by hand...

Anyway, the update is that this thing can now render my entire forest. #ToolsForMathematicalThought

Making some progress on creating my own domain-specific markup language for forests… #ToolsForMathematicalThought

RIP me... I started thinking today about what the minimal markup language needed is for Stacks/Forest-style mathematical work. The goal here is to directly support what I have done some horrible hacks to Hugo and various markdown processors to achieve. A secondary goal is to remove all the things from Markdown that are ill-advised (including section headers: see https://forest.jonmsterling.com/trees/tfmt-000b/).

I started to write about the notion of “forests of evergreen notes”, and the authorship model that I employ for collaborative forests: https://forest.jonmsterling.com/trees/tfmt-000v/

Finally starting to be able to generate reasonable PDFs from my Forest... #ToolsForMathematicalThought

Hitting critical mass with a densely linked mathematical #zettelkasten feels great… #ToolsForMathematicalThought

Working in my Forest, where I can have everything interlinked and browsable, is such a joy... #ToolsForMathematicalThought

#Tusky, my #Mastodon #Client, has no easy way to show what Hashtags I'm #Following; I maintain a text file with them, but I got a better idea: posting them!

I'm #NowFollowing:

#MathInduction #MathArt #BeTheAlgorithm #ToolsForMathematicalThought

Post your hashtags, plus #NowFollowing, to share with us all.

I just parallelized the rendering of SVGs from tikz in #Forester and wow this is so much better lol

My new treatment of macro preambles has made #forester about a zillion times easier to use... #ToolsForMathematicalThought

I've made a big improvement to to Forester's contextualization interface: when you click into a context, the present node is **highlighted** and you are scrolled directly to it. Something similar is done for backlinks.

Short demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1so2TEK8so

Several people asked why existing tools are inadequate for writing large bodies of professional mathematics in hypertext... I have started to update my notes to discuss the "table stakes" requirements for any tool for mathematical thought, as well as some discussion of how things might work in the future: https://www.jonmsterling.com/forest/trees/tfmt-000e/

I have been working on user interfaces for contextualizing mathematical ideas in my new tool called #Forester. Here is a quick video showing the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKTbDOZ5VeE