Lectures at college and the inseparable hours of studying have been taking up much of my time recently, and in this mindset have made me start thinking about how I could somehow improve that wonderfully tedious and hand-cramping task of taking lectures notes from the board. Ok, so taking lecture notes by hand is far from the biggest inconvenience any student experiences on a regular basis; nonetheless, the idea came upon me that if I could create and store all these notes electronically, I’d be saving myself a good deal of pain (presently and during exam season).
The main challenge of this plan was finding some way to make the input/conversion process for turning what’s written on the blackboard ultimately into some prettily formatted pages, quickly and trivially. Although I’m sure it’s been done by many before, using MS Word or the like immediately struck me as impractical – indeed, worse than pen and paper, in my mind. Hence, my initial thoughts were centered on using a lightweight markup of some sort, such as YAML, Markdown, or perhaps simply plain text. (The text could then be rendered nicely by a program at some later stage.) My plans were to write a small editor application specifically for some format, with facilities such as auto-completion and an in-built previewer to make the note-taking even more efficient.
In the end, my mind was decided when my friend David suggested that I simply use the widespread wiki markup language reST as the primary format. This turns out to be almost perfect, since the Python docutils package contains an advanced and stable reST-to-LaTeX converter – and what could be prettier than LaTeX for displaying notes full of complex formulae. He also kindly offerred to lend me his Eee PC. I daresay this seems like an ideal combination…
Now, I must confess that I have not in fact yet begun to adopt this wonderful approach of taking notes, despite my being quite eager to start. Given that there are only about two weeks remaining before the current courses finish and Christmas holidays begin, I thought that I’d just set up my environment and at best give the plan a “test run”. Beginning in January, however, I very much intend to be using nothing but the Eee PC for notes. I will of course duly report back how the matter turns out, and with any luck, begin a weekly routine of uploading lovely LaTeX PDFs of (not so lovely) physics material!
