For the majority of my studies I took notes in Word and it’s equation editor (LaTeX syntax is most of what you need to know for it)
It was great for sharing and searching notes, but definitely challenging.
Once in a while when a diagram was needed it would be really challenging to do (no stylus or touchscreen back then), and when a new math symbol showed up for the first time it would be a challenge.
In other times it could be useful, like if there’s a lot of matrices being written copy and pasting helps.
Overall, it was a good experience since for later math research I needed to know LaTeX well anyhow. But the flexibility of pen and paper can’t be matched.
I did this back in 2011, though I used OpenOffice (and now I believe it's LibreOffice) at first, its equation editor syntax was a lot like LaTeX. I didn't realize MS Word had a text input option for its equation editor.
Eventually I decided to switch to Vim and LaTeX though (I was pretty new to both). The OP's setup looks much fancier than what I did, I just used pdflatex and mupdf. Diagrams I would draw by hand on paper.
I am grateful to have my notes in a nice clean searchable pdf now 10 years later, but unfortunately my career in software has yet to have me actually do differential equations again.
I have to ask because I miss it so dearly: is there any modern alternative to a 10" netbook like what I had back then? Besides the GPD win that was posted a few days ago. And I don't like the idea of a super expensive tablet with its heavy screen.
And despite my love of netbooks from that era, part of what had me switch to Vim/LaTeX was my cheap ~$100 netbook not being very quick with large documents in an editor like LibreOffice.
Also a random thought: the netbook had also come with "windows 7 starter edition", which didn't let you change the wallpaper, much to my frustration. They went so far as (I believe) hashing the image, so if you edited it at all then it would show a black screen. [1]
I think that was what got me into Linux, despite years of losing access to wifi every time I updated and lost the Broadcom wifi drivers. My current laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port, I wonder how people get into Linux now.
[1]: The argument of "this laptop is resource constrained so it needs a simpler version of windows" seems weak when they go to such great lengths to enforce it. Maybe it was more about selling it for cheap and expecting some people to upgrade? Imagine paying $60 for windows for a <$150 netbook. (Maybe it was actually $200, I forget)
I'm done with classes as of last year but I just used pen & paper in all my schooling. I would rewrite my notes on a tablet after class though. It's more common to see people using iPads and Surfaces than when I first started.
I have heard that the latest chromebooks make it easier to switch into linux mode. I bought one a few years ago and had to go through some hacks to run linux, and every time I power it on, it would tell me to press space bar to "fix" everything and wipe the harddrive.
Was the tablet not a good fit for real time handwriting? Is it a bit slower than pen and paper?
Linux is better supported on Chromebooks now. Some of them have been officially blessed by Google to do it so there shouldn't be any problems like that.
Haha it was fine for real time handwriting, I just did that because it forced me to go through my notes again and I felt like using a tablet may have been more distracting for me and other people.
Cool, did it have a physical keyboard? And if so, what was it like when using it like a laptop? That's my main aversion to a tablet, I would prefer a laptop so I could precisely angle a screen and the screen wouldn't be so heavy.
Also the price since I would almost exclusively use it for traveling.
Ah, I did. The type cover/keyboard is necessary. It works well in laptop mode while on a table. It is harder to use in laptop mode on a lap, but possible with practice.
The price is worth it, I think -- I have a friend who I convinced to get one, and lo after his research group saw him using one handful of people bought them as well :)
You can use a USB keyboard on it, and a tablet is more ergonomic when its not attached to a keyboard so you can position them differently. I really like the better ergonomics of a magic keyboard from Apple, but its too expensive compared to a USB/BT keyboard you can positon anywhere. Tablets are actually better for positioning, since you end up bending your back when using keyboards. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJQL3LL/A/magic-keyboard-...
Obviously the author can take these notes and be a mathematical success. That's amazing. Personally, I confess that I don't have enough cycles to both understand a lecture and live-LaTeX it. (Can I add that I am a math PhD and also very experienced with LaTeX? So if you feel that this may be too much for you, IMHO that's OK).
In my university we can take photos after a topic was explained. The prof told us, that he wants us to understand the topic and ask questions while he was explaining.
Take a look at what you do remember easily, and then game your note taking process, so that you add that stimulus/reward to your note taking. Maybe it's paper, maybe it's a computer, maybe it 's a fountain pen. Maybe you're like me and your retention is better if you're fully engaged and not taking notes. I see notes as some see a camera. You're so busy trying to transcribe what you're seeing, you're not fully comprehending it till later, and that's only if you're good at notes, otherwise, you now have a dumbass teaching you when you could have been listening to the litteral expert in their field explain it, paying better attention and understanding it; rather than memorizing it. Once you understand it, you're not memorizing, you're explaining. But that's just how I work. Find what works for you.
Thank you for the kind words, but I nodded when I read the parent post. It reminded me of something my wife and I talk about, how we took a lot of video when our kids were young, and maybe we should have just enjoyed more of the time.
Apologies, I intended to comment on the same one you replied to, not to your comment. I remember struggling so hard in school to take notes, and then not understanding them.
I hadn't heard of you, but really respect what you're doing. I hope I didn't cause offence.
Interesting - once I got into a rythym I didn't find tex-ing live lectures actually that time consuming. I think it really depends on the field of math though, maybe?
I also use a markdown + inline latex setup rather than tex from scratch.
I found it was relatively easy to type and tex everything that was written on the board. But I think my comprehension probably suffered a bit, though maybe that would have happened from using a pen and paper too.
It depends on the subject matter for me. Live-LaTeXing works pretty well for me until matrices get involved. Just fractions, equations, and summations are fairly easy though.
I'll second this. I am very familiar with latex. I have even done similar things to my neovim configuration (I use ultisnips) and have a few custom latex 'sty'les to include various commands to do stuff I do frequently but is a pain otherwise.
This however is and was for end-product stuff: my own personal collection of condensed notes, assignments that needed to be typed, and so on (I also use ultisnips for coding). I studied mathematics as a undergrad (I have a first class degree in Mathematics from a UK university) and I hand-wrote my lectures, and I know many mathematicians that are frankly much better than I am who find computers frankly difficult and avoided LaTeX as long as they possibly could.
What matters (if you are studying mathematics) is doing mathematics (exercises, experimentation, understanding proofs etc). There is no substitute. This is a nice to have, but will not make you a better mathematician. If you want to know how to be a good student, IMO this is a nice guide: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/study_pu...
I typed notes throughout my undergrad, and it worked poorly. Everything in math is slow to type and fast to handwrite: subscripts, exponents, arrows, matrices, Greek letters, labels, diagrams, integrals, fractions. My shorthand omitted all latex conventions (A_0 became A0, arrows became ->), but it wasn't enough.
When I was in college I submitted printed assignments generated with LaTeX; made it easier for the teacher to grade and I was able to do a fair bit of copy/paste.
Taking notes in real time, however, is a whole different beast.
I did this too for a while. It's a fun challenge for yourself and a cool way to brag to your friends. Paper is such a better interface though and real time latex takes away too much of your attention from the lecture I found in the end (the best way to attend a lecture is to barely write anything imo, just some rough notes while mostly spending your time in your head - if you missed something look at a friends' notes or handouts after).
Note-taking is very individual. I found out in university that the act of writing lecture notes helps me focus and remember. Otherwise my mind would drift. In fact, I soon realized that I should write my own lecture notes, even if I never look at them afterwards. And only paper is good enough for fast writing of math.
I used a tablet pc during my math bachelor's (convertible laptop computer with Wacom that existed 2002~2008). A couple years back I still used a Samsung Android tablet with pen (and squid). If I went back to school now I'd probably use an iPad and pen, or perhaps one of those wacom enabled e-readers (remarkable, boox?)
Back in school I did hand written notes in class and retyped them in TeX when preparing for exams. I found this to be the best way for me to learn and retain.
I can't imagine live TeXing a graph or tree diagram
Maybe I'm missing something but why do I need to write notes like textbook when textbooks already exist. I have only taken applied math courses, but when I go to lectures I'm trying to create a mental model of how the various assumptions, statements and theorems relate to one another. I need to listen to the lecture on the arguments of how the proof works, create examples, counter examples and outliers to test the proof. Its very hard to even write basic handwritten notes when the lecture goes on without breaking the flow. But then maybe I'm probably just a datapoint around the median.
People learn in different ways. Personally, I've always been a "learn by using my hands" person, and in college I was a meticulous note taker. I could never use the method you described, but have met others like that too.
I’m the same way. You don’t need notes when you understand the underlying concepts. For me it is better to spend 100% of my concentration on the prof and ask questions when something doesn’t make sense.
That worked for me in courses which provided context, or where proof were short and simple. Then I took a real analysis seminar where very little motivation was provided, and couldn't grok the proof in the time provided. If I had better memory or faster understanding or read ahead I would have been fine... ended up taking detailed notes and trying to fit it all back together after the course, which was not very efficient.
For me, typesetting my handwritten notes was part of the learning process. Usually one textbook is not enough for me, I always reference multiple sources (textbook, lecture notes, blog posts, homework problems) when learning so it's helpful to put a condensed version of everything in one place. Textbooks usually have a lot of fluff. My personal notes are also really helpful as reference material later -- three months from now I probably won't remember anything that I read today.
Our professors would often mention tips and tricks that weren't in the textbook. It's only through lecture notes that we could remember them given how much information there was.
After all, if the lecture is just the textbook, why bother going at that point? :)
It creates plain LaTeX files that can be shared with non-Emacs users, but also works with org-mode. Math preview images are SVG by default and are crisp on high res / retina screens.
When reading the article I was thinking "shit, maybe I have to learn drop emacs and finally learn vim". But then u post your emacs latex plugin and I can perish that thought.
Hi, Emacs can't display images when it is running as a terminal application, so probably only makes sense to use xenops with Emacs running as a real graphical application.
I just wish all uni's and colleges recorded their lectures by default. That way we can focus on what's important in class and if we missed something we'd be able to watch the recorded lecture. Trying to write down what's being said and written AND focusing on the lecture at the same time is hard.
I'm always envious of people who have vim/emacs setups that appear so clean and functional.
I just think to my cobbled-together vim setup which both had a long startup and was riddled with idiosyncrasies (both I'm sure caused by my own misconfiguration).
I since have migrated to spacemacs, thinking that I could let people more competent than I do the brunt of configuration, but still I have managed to make the startup long and the experience janky.
I guess I should either spend more or less time configuring my setups...
I'm the same in desiring a preconfigured setup. I think it's similar with how I like the same thing but for a tiling window manager like i3/sway. I suspect there might be a fair few who still prefer the vim or emacs environment that want a preconfigured setup with a basic level of configuration, as is commonly offered by a desktop environment.
I like leaving the configuration to someone who I know has a better understanding of all the offerings. I realise this may not appeal to someone who has strong opinions or similar level of understanding as these maintainers however.
I might mention, if you hadn't already been aware of it, that SpaceVim exists as well. I really like the concept of layers, the bundling of packages for different features for basic/simple configuration (both SpaceVim/Emacs have this).
Usually what happens when I try a text editor, shell, etc. is that I'm happy with 95% of the features but there are a few things that nag at me. And inevitably I go down a rabbit hole of hacks until I end up with (an approximation of) my desired feature. If I do that enough times then something ends up wonky until my whole setup is kinda scuffed.
As an example pertinent to this post, I repeatedly have to dismiss notifications from pdflatex about some sort of incompatibility with my setup. I think it's relative line numbering, I'm not sure though. My attempts to fix it have only resulted in pdf files occasionally opening as raw code.
I will take a look at SpaceVim, though. I've been using vanilla vim for a while to edit personal stuff because I don't want to open spacemacs...
Just kind of a side note - Gilles's work is such a pleasure to browse, worth taking a look. Always made with deep understanding of the content and a spartan taste in design: https://castel.dev/notes
Blind person here. I've been using LaTex for note taking since age 15. Since braille typewriters are heavy and clunky and electronic braille notetakers are expensive, I decided it was the right thing to do pretty early on. I started doing this when I transferred out of blind school. Being able to compile my notes into a PDF was definitely useful, considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before.
When I got to college, I started requesting all the materials that students normally get in LaTeX. PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.
Obviously, what I write for myself isn't pure, compilable LaTeX, I usually omit the dollar signs, write things like 2^32 instead of 2^{32} etc.
By the way, the linked post was almost unreadable to screen readers, the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable made my screen reader say every syllable separately, which breaks the pronunciation rules.
Hum, so when you copy the text and post it into Notepad, it's written with a ton of dashes at places I can't make sense of (not syllables or every word). If you post it in this text box or in Word, it looks normal, I can't even figure out how to share it here (without manually "dashing") except this screenshot : https://imgur.com/DWRJlKf.
I think they are some weird line wrapping hint characters? If I paste it into Pop OS's text editor I can only see the dashes if I shrink the editor to cause word wrapping, and it will insert the dashes at the wrap. It seems like some UTF magic that I hate!
The character is Unicode U+00AD, the soft hyphen: "= discretionary hyphen" / "commonly abbreviated as SHY" / "an invisible format character indicating a possible hyphenation location"
I know of it, but apparently I've never previously pasted text using it into my text editor, because it's displayed there as a hyphen (though it is still U+00AD).
I'm wondering what CMS/editor outputs so many SHY characters.
It appears to be a site generated with react+Gatsby. Would be interesting to figure it out which text component is responsible for this odd text decoration
Likely, the site was set up before all browsers supported automatic hyphenation (fairly recently), and the soft hyphens were added to assist with hyphenation.
pdflatex, just like TeX, comes from an 8-bit past, so it will frequently resort to custom encodings to fit all the glyphs in a single 255-character font. That means that any 8-bit "character" (in PDF bytes, what is really copy-pasteable or readable by TTS system) can actually stand for any displayable character.
Perhaps XeTeX is better?
(I am not intimately familiar with what pdf(la)tex does, but this is how TeX works, and I've seen those PDFs, esp with eg. Cyrillic, which on select show up garbled text)
It's something I think we're all used to, and will likely always be the case, because non-elderly blind people are such a tiny minority (perhaps we're even over-represented here on HN).
I did an experimental stint of turning in problem sets in TeX and found it to be very time consuming, though part of the exercise was to write up the solutions carefully and that took time too. I don't think I could possibly take notes in class that way. Also, typing in class would bother people, I expect.
One of my professors told me that the best way to do notes was write down normal quick ones in class, but then at home, rewrite the notes in complete sentences including the stuff you remember from the lecture that you didn't originally write down. He said this was a big help in absorbing and retaining the material. It sounded like a good idea, though I was too disorganized to actually try it.
This showcase in particular is what inspired me to pick up vim and LaTeX, and later pick up emacs. I could not have come back to my degree again without these tools. Many thanks to the author for the inspiration.
When I was in college, I used Grapher on Mac OS X to take all my math notes. It was very quick and used some LaTeX-like keyboard shortcuts. I'd copy the equations I generated into TextEdit (side note: I still miss the RTFD bundle format now that I use Windows and Linux). No doubt my professors thought I was just dicking around because I was the only person taking notes on a laptop but it was very nice and the results were much more legible than my handwritten notes.
I'm currently a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge and there's quite a few students who live type notes in various different formats. I think that the majority of the learning curve comes when getting used to the format of writing in LaTeX, and once you have that down (so that typing both prose and mathematics takes little to no effort) you can type notes faster than you can write them - with the small exception of maybe matrices and certain advanced things which slow you down.
The benefit of having typed notes at least for me come from being able to search, having a good record of my own understanding of a course and also not having to rely on keeping handwritten notes safe. They also look pretty which is a bonus for studying from them.
I am always in awe of people like you. I have no idea how someone can type \frac{}{} faster than I can draw a horizontal line (while listening to a lecturer), but I believe you.
Meanwhile I use Onenote. I don't have to worry about keeping notes safe, or the stress of trying to type at warpspeed. I would go with a Remarkable tablet but now with subscription pricing it's a non starter.
Latex specific ide \frac and auto fill.
You can for sure get speedy with practice!
Those beautiful graphs now… I ended up using secondary programs to gen images (pdf or whatever) of graphs and such for latex to bring in the usual way. Not as good!
My recollection is that the main speed advantage lay in being able to copy-paste the previous line when working through a derivation.
I live-LaTeXed notes for a couple of years in undergrad but eventually went back to pen + paper (approximately all my assignments continued to be typeset, though).
Great stuff! I am in awe of your beautifully done graphs.
For speed with, e.g. matrices like you say, but also more specialized course specific notation, could you build a set of quick functions for the topic of the day to aid note taking?
If set up your environment just so, you can repurpose really simple commands like the slash in “\this” to do some common but annoying thing like bold upright lettering or underbars or something. (I actually need to go look at latex to be sure what all you could make maximally parsimonious… it’s been a while and I mostly copy and paste my old commands around. Anyway, you probably already do this kind of thing.
This is a very cool setup but in my experience not using pen-and-paper makes comprehension terribly inefficient, if not impossible, during class especially when it comes to subjects like math. Besides, even excessive note-taking can impede the learning process. Best is to pay close attention to what the lecturer says and occasionally write down a few key ideas.
I was going to say the same. I'd takes notes, but most of my attention was on the professor and what they were saying. When there was something I knew I wouldn't remember, that's when focused switched to taking good notes. Otherwise it consumes an awful lot of brain-powee/attention, and well, there's a textbook if you really want textbook style notes.
Somewhat off topic, the very need for students to take notes during a math lecture seems completely idiotic to me, in this day an age when a professor could just share the link to the handout with their students. The margins should be wide enough for the students to be able to “personalize” the notes (they have to study them later anyway, don’t they?), or the notes could be distributed in the source format to begin with.
As someone who is currently taking a math class, the point of taking notes isn’t to have a record of what was taught. Rather taking notes helps me concentrate on the lecture instead of having my mind wander and for whatever reason hand writing the notes helps the concepts sink into my memory better than just listening to the lecture and reviewing the handouts. A lot of times I’ll take notes and then throw them out in a few days because the handouts and textbook are better for actually reviewing the topics later and the notes have already served their purpose of helping me learn from the lectures.
For quick self notes I use Markdown. I found most rendering engines support $math$ these days. Either that or pen-and-paper/tablet/remarkable.
Joplin is fantastic for creating and organizing references as long as you don't need advanced layouts. When you need them you can very quickly convert MD syntax to html or latex.
On a side note I always wonder who has the time of fine tuning uber-specialized text editor configuration at those levels. Not only that, but also having the burden of maintaining that and the inconvenience of being dependent on a very specific setup. I could see myself doing such an effort only after 4-5 years of daily use and friction.
I'm curious about the correlation (or lack of) between this kind of note taking and the ability to talk and type at the same time. I can take high level concept notes, but not details. And I can't talk and type at the same time all. Always figured it was a shared brain thing between the talking and the typing.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadIt was great for sharing and searching notes, but definitely challenging.
Once in a while when a diagram was needed it would be really challenging to do (no stylus or touchscreen back then), and when a new math symbol showed up for the first time it would be a challenge.
In other times it could be useful, like if there’s a lot of matrices being written copy and pasting helps.
Overall, it was a good experience since for later math research I needed to know LaTeX well anyhow. But the flexibility of pen and paper can’t be matched.
Eventually I decided to switch to Vim and LaTeX though (I was pretty new to both). The OP's setup looks much fancier than what I did, I just used pdflatex and mupdf. Diagrams I would draw by hand on paper.
I am grateful to have my notes in a nice clean searchable pdf now 10 years later, but unfortunately my career in software has yet to have me actually do differential equations again.
I have to ask because I miss it so dearly: is there any modern alternative to a 10" netbook like what I had back then? Besides the GPD win that was posted a few days ago. And I don't like the idea of a super expensive tablet with its heavy screen.
What do students take notes on now?
Also a random thought: the netbook had also come with "windows 7 starter edition", which didn't let you change the wallpaper, much to my frustration. They went so far as (I believe) hashing the image, so if you edited it at all then it would show a black screen. [1]
I think that was what got me into Linux, despite years of losing access to wifi every time I updated and lost the Broadcom wifi drivers. My current laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port, I wonder how people get into Linux now.
[1]: The argument of "this laptop is resource constrained so it needs a simpler version of windows" seems weak when they go to such great lengths to enforce it. Maybe it was more about selling it for cheap and expecting some people to upgrade? Imagine paying $60 for windows for a <$150 netbook. (Maybe it was actually $200, I forget)
I'm done with classes as of last year but I just used pen & paper in all my schooling. I would rewrite my notes on a tablet after class though. It's more common to see people using iPads and Surfaces than when I first started.
Was the tablet not a good fit for real time handwriting? Is it a bit slower than pen and paper?
Haha it was fine for real time handwriting, I just did that because it forced me to go through my notes again and I felt like using a tablet may have been more distracting for me and other people.
Also the price since I would almost exclusively use it for traveling.
The price is worth it, I think -- I have a friend who I convinced to get one, and lo after his research group saw him using one handful of people bought them as well :)
Surface Pro 3 works great with linux when I used it, but you can't replace anything on it. If you just want to use a laptop you already have this is a good option. https://www.amazon.com/XP-PEN-Graphic-Drawing-Digital-Teachi...
Newton may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but HN enables us to casually rub elbows with them.
I hadn't heard of you, but really respect what you're doing. I hope I didn't cause offence.
Heavens, no. Enjoy the day.
I also use a markdown + inline latex setup rather than tex from scratch.
This however is and was for end-product stuff: my own personal collection of condensed notes, assignments that needed to be typed, and so on (I also use ultisnips for coding). I studied mathematics as a undergrad (I have a first class degree in Mathematics from a UK university) and I hand-wrote my lectures, and I know many mathematicians that are frankly much better than I am who find computers frankly difficult and avoided LaTeX as long as they possibly could.
What matters (if you are studying mathematics) is doing mathematics (exercises, experimentation, understanding proofs etc). There is no substitute. This is a nice to have, but will not make you a better mathematician. If you want to know how to be a good student, IMO this is a nice guide: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/study_pu...
For non-math classes, typing notes worked well.
Indeed, I think the same and am on the very same boat.
Taking notes in real time, however, is a whole different beast.
I can't imagine live TeXing a graph or tree diagram
After all, if the lecture is just the textbook, why bother going at that point? :)
https://github.com/dandavison/xenops
It creates plain LaTeX files that can be shared with non-Emacs users, but also works with org-mode. Math preview images are SVG by default and are crisp on high res / retina screens.
(Do any of the features work in the terminal?)
How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448678 - March 2019 (221 comments)
How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652 - March 2019 (6 comments)
I just think to my cobbled-together vim setup which both had a long startup and was riddled with idiosyncrasies (both I'm sure caused by my own misconfiguration).
I since have migrated to spacemacs, thinking that I could let people more competent than I do the brunt of configuration, but still I have managed to make the startup long and the experience janky.
I guess I should either spend more or less time configuring my setups...
I like leaving the configuration to someone who I know has a better understanding of all the offerings. I realise this may not appeal to someone who has strong opinions or similar level of understanding as these maintainers however.
I might mention, if you hadn't already been aware of it, that SpaceVim exists as well. I really like the concept of layers, the bundling of packages for different features for basic/simple configuration (both SpaceVim/Emacs have this).
As an example pertinent to this post, I repeatedly have to dismiss notifications from pdflatex about some sort of incompatibility with my setup. I think it's relative line numbering, I'm not sure though. My attempts to fix it have only resulted in pdf files occasionally opening as raw code.
I will take a look at SpaceVim, though. I've been using vanilla vim for a while to edit personal stuff because I don't want to open spacemacs...
When I got to college, I started requesting all the materials that students normally get in LaTeX. PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.
Obviously, what I write for myself isn't pure, compilable LaTeX, I usually omit the dollar signs, write things like 2^32 instead of 2^{32} etc.
By the way, the linked post was almost unreadable to screen readers, the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable made my screen reader say every syllable separately, which breaks the pronunciation rules.
What CMS or editor outputs that? It's insane. I tried copying the text into a text editor and it displayed all the dashes: "math-e-mat-ics".
I am very confused, what's up with this?
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf
I know of it, but apparently I've never previously pasted text using it into my text editor, because it's displayed there as a hyphen (though it is still U+00AD).
I'm wondering what CMS/editor outputs so many SHY characters.
Sorry you had to pave the way.
> PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.
That's... sad. Is Word any better?
Perhaps XeTeX is better?
(I am not intimately familiar with what pdf(la)tex does, but this is how TeX works, and I've seen those PDFs, esp with eg. Cyrillic, which on select show up garbled text)
It's something I think we're all used to, and will likely always be the case, because non-elderly blind people are such a tiny minority (perhaps we're even over-represented here on HN).
One of my professors told me that the best way to do notes was write down normal quick ones in class, but then at home, rewrite the notes in complete sentences including the stuff you remember from the lecture that you didn't originally write down. He said this was a big help in absorbing and retaining the material. It sounded like a good idea, though I was too disorganized to actually try it.
EDIT: this seems to actually be vanilla vim. vimtex is still great, though!
The benefit of having typed notes at least for me come from being able to search, having a good record of my own understanding of a course and also not having to rely on keeping handwritten notes safe. They also look pretty which is a bonus for studying from them.
Examples:
- Analysis I (which have been edited): https://adamkelly.me/files/ia-analysis-i/analysis-i.pdf
- Graph Theory (not edited but diagrams added): https://adamkelly.me/files/ii-graph-theory/graph-theory.pdf
As a side note, one other thing I do is write short 'handouts' on topics that I think I have something to say about. For example https://adamkelly.me/files/handouts/direct-products/direct-p....
Meanwhile I use Onenote. I don't have to worry about keeping notes safe, or the stress of trying to type at warpspeed. I would go with a Remarkable tablet but now with subscription pricing it's a non starter.
Those beautiful graphs now… I ended up using secondary programs to gen images (pdf or whatever) of graphs and such for latex to bring in the usual way. Not as good!
I live-LaTeXed notes for a couple of years in undergrad but eventually went back to pen + paper (approximately all my assignments continued to be typeset, though).
For speed with, e.g. matrices like you say, but also more specialized course specific notation, could you build a set of quick functions for the topic of the day to aid note taking?
If set up your environment just so, you can repurpose really simple commands like the slash in “\this” to do some common but annoying thing like bold upright lettering or underbars or something. (I actually need to go look at latex to be sure what all you could make maximally parsimonious… it’s been a while and I mostly copy and paste my old commands around. Anyway, you probably already do this kind of thing.
Joplin is fantastic for creating and organizing references as long as you don't need advanced layouts. When you need them you can very quickly convert MD syntax to html or latex.
On a side note I always wonder who has the time of fine tuning uber-specialized text editor configuration at those levels. Not only that, but also having the burden of maintaining that and the inconvenience of being dependent on a very specific setup. I could see myself doing such an effort only after 4-5 years of daily use and friction.