I've live-TeXed (that is writing notes in real time during a lecture with LaTeX) before way back in college during math lectures.
It was a so-so experience. Math lectures for me require a lot of thought to follow otherwise I quickly become lost (often I'm lost even if I try to follow along) and the added mental overhead of TeXing on the fly often times pushed me away from actually understanding what was happening in the moment. Instead I'd have to review my notes after lecture to understand what was going on. LaTeX's batch compilation was especially infuriating, because a single error could cause the whole document to stop compiling and then if I didn't have the time to correct it, it meant the rest of the lecture was going to be visually represented with an editor and only after the lecture would I go back and correct the error.
On the upside it was way easier to go back and review my notes/make them presentable for others. Also, similar to the Matrix, after a while you become familiar enough with LaTeX that you don't need the rendered display anymore to read what's going on, so the non-compiling part becomes less of a problem.
I did a math-heavy degree, so most of my lecture summaries were all written in LaTeX due to the nature of the content (lots and lots of equations; I published most of my lecture summaries on my homepage). For a few other lectures I used Open Office / Word quite regularly (adding and placing images, and working with tables -- e.g. to picture an array -- was easier for me to accomplish with such a WYSIWYG editor).
Also, a cool thing about LaTeX is that your document source is written in plain text, so you can use git to version your source files.
Funny side note: I was using LaTeX so much during my studies that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to actually extract the LaTeX source behind equations shown on Wikipedia [0]; the equation's LaTeX source is stored in the <img> tag's alt attribute.
I've written notes during the lecture at the same speed as the lecturer with Word 2007 in the last year I had math in uni. This worked surprisingly well since Word's math typesetting requires a lot fewer \ and {} than LaTeX and you immediately see what your current equation looks like, eliminating a lot of guesses around proper bracketing, etc.
With pure LaTeX I think I couldn't have done it, despite being somewhat proficient with the language.
(I've scribbled diagrams and other images by hand and done them properly at home, but the text and math parts went fairly well in real time.)
Comments
Do many people use LaTex for notes?
I’ve considered using it for my notes on my iPhone/iPad. At the moment, I’m using Markdown but for a few things, LaTex would be better.
I've live-TeXed (that is writing notes in real time during a lecture with LaTeX) before way back in college during math lectures.
It was a so-so experience. Math lectures for me require a lot of thought to follow otherwise I quickly become lost (often I'm lost even if I try to follow along) and the added mental overhead of TeXing on the fly often times pushed me away from actually understanding what was happening in the moment. Instead I'd have to review my notes after lecture to understand what was going on. LaTeX's batch compilation was especially infuriating, because a single error could cause the whole document to stop compiling and then if I didn't have the time to correct it, it meant the rest of the lecture was going to be visually represented with an editor and only after the lecture would I go back and correct the error.
On the upside it was way easier to go back and review my notes/make them presentable for others. Also, similar to the Matrix, after a while you become familiar enough with LaTeX that you don't need the rendered display anymore to read what's going on, so the non-compiling part becomes less of a problem.
I did a math-heavy degree, so most of my lecture summaries were all written in LaTeX due to the nature of the content (lots and lots of equations; I published most of my lecture summaries on my homepage). For a few other lectures I used Open Office / Word quite regularly (adding and placing images, and working with tables -- e.g. to picture an array -- was easier for me to accomplish with such a WYSIWYG editor).
Also, a cool thing about LaTeX is that your document source is written in plain text, so you can use git to version your source files.
Funny side note: I was using LaTeX so much during my studies that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to actually extract the LaTeX source behind equations shown on Wikipedia [0]; the equation's LaTeX source is stored in the <img> tag's alt attribute.
[0] https://github.com/giu/wikipedia-tex-source-extractor
I've written notes during the lecture at the same speed as the lecturer with Word 2007 in the last year I had math in uni. This worked surprisingly well since Word's math typesetting requires a lot fewer \ and {} than LaTeX and you immediately see what your current equation looks like, eliminating a lot of guesses around proper bracketing, etc.
With pure LaTeX I think I couldn't have done it, despite being somewhat proficient with the language.
(I've scribbled diagrams and other images by hand and done them properly at home, but the text and math parts went fairly well in real time.)
Doing your notes fully in LaTeX would be hell without some convenience macros, etc. Yet I'm sure plenty swear by it.
I use org mode + LaTeX. You can enter LaTeX equations in org mode. This combination works really well.
Part of doing your notes in LaTeX is setting up a healthy suite of convenience macros—or did you mean non-LaTeX macros?
I use markdown with $\latex code in dollar signs$. With pandoc this actually works. https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#math