A good template for note taking

One of the problems that I have read that people say about LaTeX is it isn't very good for quick note taking.

Has anyone used LaTeX for quick note taking? If so what template have you used? And how have you setup your system so it is relatively easy to make quick notes?

EDIT In response to some of the comments, I am currently using vim as my editor. Which I am very proficient in using.

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I am not sure what you mean by note-taking. Could you please elaborate on the purpose? –  Peter Jansson Jan 28 '13 at 11:58
LaTeX is a processor, not an editor. Sounds like you need a reasonable text editor (Notepad++?), or perhaps emacs with org-mode, or possibly something like Evernote. Depends on what sort of structure you want for your notes and their content. –  Brent.Longborough Jan 28 '13 at 12:19
I've used the vim-latexsuite to take notes in math lectures without too many problems in the past. It's more a question of defining & learning hotkeys & shortcuts. The function keys were different environments, eg f5 was a figure environment, f3 equation&equation*,etc. ffrac would expand to \frac{<++>}{<++>} and you cold jump from one <++> to the next using ctrl+j. –  myrtille Jan 28 '13 at 14:52
–  Yiannis Lazarides Jan 28 '13 at 17:53

I take notes with latex using the outlines package. It lets you write an outline/list without typing all the environments. For ex:

\secc[tested]{The title of Outline}{
\1 This is the first level of a list.
\2 This is the second level
\3 You can go up to four levels
\4 You can dynamically change the symbols that start the list
}


I have many of these in my notes. Not one big outline.

I find it highly productive and easy to use while taking notes.

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/outlines

I also recommend setting up a bunch of macros or shortcuts for your commonly used things. It helps speed everything up.

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Thanks! This was the type of answer I was after. Do you use a common template as well? –  jaye1234 Jan 28 '13 at 19:44
I have my own class that has options for: fontsize, papersize (ipad,letter). In sublime I use snippets,on the iPad in textastic I use text expander to insert my standard template. As for where I take notes in the body: I created an environment that looks like this: \secc[tested]{Title for outline}{\1 \2 \3 }. Where the first option is a flag if the topic was tested and that puts a red underline for the Title of the outline, The second option is the title of the option, and the 3rd arguement is the outline itself. The outline environment is in the secc env. This makes it very efficient to use. –  Stephen Lien Jan 29 '13 at 12:22

I use LaTeX for note taking in an indirect way:

I use emacs org mode for note taking. It has a very rich and configurable LaTeX export. So I am able to keep my notes in org mode and export them from time to time or I can export and finalize it in LaTeX, e. g. for writing a paper. But org mode is so powerful that people used it to write papers without postprocessing of the LaTeX code. You can even include code and evaluate it on the fly, with the result being automatically included into your document, you have built in table and basic spreadsheet support ... You can intermix org code and LaTeX code if you need something special. But the org syntax is much more suitable for fast note taking, more like a wiki syntax. Org has facilities for automatic handling of todo notes and can be used as a calendar replacement as well. Parts of the document can be hidden by just pressing tab, what helps a lot to get some overview. There is also a vim clone of org mode.

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I use AUCTeX mode in emacs to take real-time notes in my calculus 1 class.

Useful features include preview-latex mode, where I hit C-c C-p C-p to toggle rendering $\dfrac{\pi}{2}$ sections as inline images.

TeX-electric-macro makes life much easier because I can type \ and get intellisense style completion for LaTeX commands.

Standard emacs functionality like abbrev-mode lets me autocomplete chunks I've already typed.

Predictive mode is handy, but I haven't used it much yet.

Once I find a way to quickly enter graphs, I will need only a few improvements to make LaTeX note taking faster than paper-based input.

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I find note taking in Pandoc's version of Markdown to be a very efficient way of taking notes in any text editor. This provides an efficient way to mix simple outlining using numbering or bullet points, alongside the math capabilities of LaTeX.

Using this approach you can get readble plain text notes that can be readily converted to LaTeX for PDF output, HTML, or any of the other formats that Pandoc supports.

Here's a short example:

1. Level one heading
- a bullet point
* also a bullet point
+ yet a third way of writing a bullet point

#. With numbered lists Pandoc will figure out the correct numbering for you
- Isn't that cool?

#. You can mix math inline $x^2 + y^2 = z^2$ or in display mode:
$$\frac{a}{b} = \frac{c}{d} + \frac{e}{f}$$

#.  You can mix styles
a) sublist with alphabetical
b) nice, eh?

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Same for me. I don't use pandoc, but the same method with a wiki-translator. –  knut Jan 28 '13 at 18:26
I want to have babies with pandoc -s input.txt -o output.pfd! –  Habi Jan 29 '13 at 16:00
I have installed pandoc, and I was very surprised! This does make note taking using LaTeX style math equations easy! –  jaye1234 Jan 29 '13 at 19:58