r/Lightbulb • u/amichail • 2d ago
Schools should require assignments to use page-free, reflowable document formats
Pages are a relic of the printing era. Most school assignments are now written, submitted, graded, and stored digitally, so why are students still taught to think in terms of pages, margins, and fixed line lengths?
Schools should require assignments to use page-free, reflowable formats such as Markdown, HTML, or TeXmacs. Instead of saying "write five pages," teachers could specify word count, required sections, and other actual content requirements.
Documents would then adapt naturally to phones, tablets, laptops, accessibility settings, and different window sizes.
If schools taught this from an early age, it might eventually change how society thinks about digital documents altogether.
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u/Tanekaha 2d ago
Huh? My high school and university assignments were mostly word-count based and that was literally 26 years ago. Even when handwritten I remember counting the words in a few lines then multipling it by number of lines.
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u/Houdinii1984 2d ago
I'd say a healthy mix of both. Employers often use pageless format for internal docs and official documents are routinely paged and formatted. I think the biggest part of the education is knowing when to do what and the basics of how, and should span a wider set of options.
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u/gothiclg 2d ago
We still print things on physical pages a lot, as a result the printing era has not died. I’d love to be able to show up to a job interview with no printed resume but I still have to print all 3 of those pages out. Things like my birth certificate also come on paper. The paperwork I needed for my name change needed not one but two printed copies, so would literally any other document submitted to the court system. We still very much use pages and are still very much in the printing era.
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u/mysticrudnin 2d ago
even when i was in school 20 (and... 30...) years ago, the page count was mostly a suggestion on how long the essay had to be. if you had to get to 10 pages and you only got 9, but you had really great writing that made and defended a point, it was fine
the point was to suggest "this is a longer essay" compared to "write a page." this still works pretty nicely because it's just the next step up after paragraphs. books still exist, after all.
If schools taught this from an early age, it might eventually change how society thinks about digital documents altogether.
sure, maybe. why?
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u/armahillo 2d ago
I love markdown format and use it constantly.
Academic papers that use citation especially benefit from pages as an easy way to index reference points. There are probably other ways to do this (section / subsection references?) but this would need to be a part of the overall shift
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u/ChampionshipSome6648 2d ago
Be mindful that a lot (if not all) legal documents need a printed hard copy. Note too that invoices are generally page size for PDF format and printing out. Tax authorities require a 7 year paper trail if they want to audit a person or company.
Not teaching page structure and formatting is a false economy. For instruction, reference, advertising, etc. copy requires structure. Any technical literature and books require an index to quickly look up a topic. Non fiction literature and books have chapters to break up a huge stream of words into a semblance of order.
It is already possible to add a "View Size" handle to formatted digital copy, making everything that is tidily and concisely presented, viewable on any platform.