Andrew McNabb wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 12:01:17PM -0600, Byron Clark wrote:I need to take class notes that involve a significant amount of mathematical symbols and formulas. Typically I would use LaTeX for this purpose, but I'm wondering if I should be looking at something else. What do you use for class notes? How well does it support including math?Jeff Anderson does ReST with embedded LaTeX. Hopefully we can get him to post a message with all of the details of how he does it.
Yes, I do in fact do that. :)I wrote up some info on how I do that, and stuck it on my (very very very unfinished) website:
http://www.programmerq.net/rsttricks.htmlBasically I started out transcribing my handwritten notes. When I got fast enough, I started taking notes in class like that. It takes some practice, and I make lots of mistakes in class. I suggest creating a Makefile to check your syntax by running :make from vim. vim's way of displaying the errors by line number makes it very convenient to find the markup errors as you go.
The tips on my page basically give some examples of things I've run into when trying to do "speed latex equation markup" as well as ReST. Without knowing it, I was following Bram Moolenaar's advice in "Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing 2.0" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078
I don't know of a better way to electronically represent math equations than latex markup-- It can be output to pretty much anything including MathML.
The only other thing that I'm aware of that people use to electronically represent math equations is Microsoft Equation. It is very clunky, big, and bulky to work with. I'm fairly certain that its keyboard interface is the "hit tab 12 times to select what you need" drill.
Writing invalid latex equation markup while taking notes isn't a big deal. You retain information better if you review it anyway. I find that going through my notes the evening after I take them helps me learn better, and I just happen to be also worrying about how the markup looks.
I also have addressed another problem that comes up when taking notes on a laptop-- pictures and graphs. I bought a pen tablet at the bookstore for $80 or $90. I open up a graphic program at the beginning of class, and plug in my tablet. If I need to jot down a graph, I alt-tab over to my graphic program and spit it out as fast as I can and save it. I just use the .. image:: directive in ReST so it will show up in the right place.
I've played around with gnuplot for doing graphs. I save the graph markup in a separate file, and have the Makefile handle it when it runs my ReST sources through the rst2whatever converter. I think I read that you can embed gnuplot graph sources in latex documents, but I haven't seen anything about how to do that with straight rst sources. I don't have one handy, but a template gnuplot source file is needed to quickly handle the on-the-fly creation of graphs in class. I usually worry about adjusting things like scale when I review my notes.
I plan to take History of Music for my Civ general credits. I'm not sure if I'd need to ever write musical notation as part of my notes, but LilyPond is out there, and is fairly straightforward and easy to typeset simple things that might be in notes. I might get around to writing an rst directive to handle lilypond markup. If there are any music majors out there, I'd be interested to know if any of you take your music theory notes using lilypond markup. Can lilypond output braille music markup for blind people? Latex markup can be parsed and output to MathML, which is a standard for accessibility-related issues for math markup. I wonder how good the open source music notation for blind is.
If there is any specific note taking thing I've missed, let me know so I can figure out how to do it? Chemistry, chemicals, chemical reactions maybe? It's been too long since I took chemistry in high school to remember what kind of notes I took, and how they looked. Circuit schematics may be tricky when I get further into my major-- the resolution of the small wacom tablet I have is limited.
Wow, this got long. Sorry for all my rambling!So, uh.. yeah. Use latex equations for note-taking. You just need to be prepared to compensate for writing bad markup. Concentrate on making it as human readable as possible when in class. Worry about fixing your mistakes later.
Thanks! Jeff Anderson
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