Ask HN: Favorite way to typeset mathematical notes?

4 points by tnecniv 2y ago ↗ HN

I do a lot of mathematical research and find myself often wanting to create short write ups that involve equations and references to share with collaborators.

While I am quite good with LaTeX, I find it lacking for this purpose. Setting up a base document, importing all my packages, getting a sane layout, etc. takes time away from the actual writing I want to do. On the other end, things like Notion have LaTeX support as an afterthought and it is quite annoying to write documents in it when there are a lot of equations. Moreover, I am not sure if there's a good way to add Bibtex references I want them in those note apps.

Have any of you found a good, LaTeX-lite solution for churning out quick research note documents?

5 comments

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RGamma 2y ago ↗

I found TeXmacs (not related to (La)TeX) to be quite nice for basic stuff, but haven't dug too deep. Worth trying though.

dibujaleojos 2y ago ↗

What about using Overleaf.com? I find it takes away the setup part and allows you to start typing in LaTeX right away. The downside is that it is an online tool.

lnwlebjel 2y ago ↗

Second the use of overleaf.com. I find the fact that it's online as an upside, making it as easy to use as google docs (ie from any of my computers, and to share with collaborators). Given your use case, I'd suggest creating a template for notes that you can use over and over, significantly reducing overhead. There are ways to keep it in a repo and link to it if you want to get fancy.

As an academic this also lowers the bar to converting notes into research papers which is a plus.

You mentioned bibtex, which for references is also fairly straightforward to do on overleaf. I keep all of mine in a one .bib file in a repo and link to it making the incorporation of references into a document very easy.

If you're at a university or in a scientific society (eg IEEE) you might have free access to the premium features - worth looking into.

landosaari 2y ago ↗

There is the option of incorporating vim with LaTeX.

Gilles Castel goes over this in [0]

Results of lecture notes can be seen here [1]

[0] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/#vim-and-latex

[1] https://castel.dev/notes

btzo 2y ago ↗

I use Obsidian for this.

Basically you have a markdown file and add latex when needed. It's not the best tool if you need to format the document in a very specific way, but for personal notes works really well