Note-taking setup

October 6, 2016 11:58 PM

I need to be able to efficiently take notes digitally that involve both figures (think simple geometric drawings) and typeset equations interspersed and interwoven together. What's the best setup for this?

Things I've tried:
1) latex equations + scanned hand drawn figures: it takes really long to scan, crop, and insert the figures at the right places
2) take all notes handwritten and scan them: my hand writing is a bit messy, and it's hard to search the documents
3) latex equations + digitally create figures: the figures take too long to create

Things I've not tried:
1) taking notes entirely digitally using pen and tablet: not sure if it's worth the investment money wise...

I would be willing to take notes on pen and paper by hand and process them later for digital storage (since I like to review my notes at least once anyways), but ideally the processing time should be no more than the original note taking time, and I haven't been able to come up with a feasible solution yet.

Curious to hear about methods/setups/softwares that have worked for other people... It seems like with so many students and so many technologically capable people, this would already be a solved problem?

posted by dragonfruit to Grab Bag (12 answers total)

Have you tried OneNote? Handwritten notes are searchable. (I have no personal experience with this feature.)
posted by she's not there at 12:15 AM on October 7, 2016

OneNote can accommodate both these things. It understands handwriting, and the newer version has an equation function. Try it out.
posted by alchemist at 12:26 AM on October 7, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions for OneNote. I watched the promotional video on the website, but I still have a few questions:
1) would I need some sort of tablet/pen setup to be able to use it?
2) can the equations be typeset or would they need to be handwritten (if they can be typeset, would this be using latex? or some sort of setup like Microsoft word has, where one needs to flip through a bunch of menus to click on the desired symbol)?
3) regarding handwriting recognition, is there an OCR functionality for just searching? Or the capability to automatically convert handwritten words into typed words?
posted by dragonfruit at 12:39 AM on October 7, 2016

Best answer: I went the OneNote + tablet route for my last couple years of classes - I was an early adopter of the MS Surface and have since then seen a proliferation of Surfaces (plus the occasional ipad pro) in classrooms (I spend a lot of time with engineering students and profs). If you're looking to use it just as a note-taking device and not as a full-on laptop replacement, the older Surface models can be had for relatively cheap second-hand and are perfectly adequate. I also knew a couple people who had regular laptops and used an external tablet + pen (like those Wacom/etc tablets used for digital art) but that seems a lot more cumbersome and takes some getting used to if you don't already use it regularly.

Regarding your other two questions:

2) You have the option of either handwriting equations or using the MS word equation editor (which, as you may already know, has a bunch of latex-like shorthand built in -- all the greek letters, logic symbols, sub/superscript, etc..). If you handwrite equations, there is a "Ink to Math" function (highlight the equation and it will try to convert) but it's not very good.

3) There is OCR for searching and also an "Ink to Text" function that will try to convert your highlighted selection to typed text.

Re: the automatic recognition (math and text), I never had very good luck with my messy handwriting and ended up not using them at all. (I, uh, wasn't a very diligent student near the end, so I wasn't exactly reviewing my notes that much anyway.) I'll try to dig up some examples of the recognition ability/lack thereof if I can find my old notes...
posted by btfreek at 1:32 AM on October 7, 2016

Here we go:

Math recognition (window pops up when you highlight your text and click "ink to math"; apparently you can then tweak things either by rewriting, or clicking on elements and selecting from a dropdown menu)

Text conversion

Search without text conversion
posted by btfreek at 2:24 AM on October 7, 2016

Math teacher here. I use a tablet (Surface clone), pen, and Onenote to prep and do notes every day. It's the solution you want.

OneNote and Word have basically the same equation editor, and both DO have TeX-like shortcuts. I almost never click the menu unless doing something new where I don't know the commands. Alt+= opens the equation window then you can hover over most icons in the menu to see their \shortcuts .
posted by Wulfhere at 4:06 AM on October 7, 2016

If you set the autocorrect option to "autocorrect math", you can type simple latex code. This works well in Microsoft word, but is buggy on onenote. (I have 2013, maybe 2016 is better?).
posted by Valancy Rachel at 6:47 AM on October 7, 2016

Have you looked at something like a Livescribe? It integrates pretty well with Evernote so no scanning of handwritten notes required, plus you have the audio timestamps synced to what was written at that time.

I wouldn't have purchased one, but was given it as a gift in law school. It didn't work for most classes, where the notes were pretty much all text based, but I did have one class graphs/charts heavy, and the Livescribe was a godsend for that.
posted by sparklemotion at 7:28 AM on October 7, 2016

It's expensive as hell, so I wouldn't buy it just for this purpose, but: Mathematica does almost everything you want. While it's better known for being a computation language, the Notebook format that it uses also has pretty good support for WYSIWYG equations, and there are some basic drawing tools that allow you to insert graphics mid-stream as well. One of my students one year submitted most of his physics homework sets "typed up" in Mathematica. They weren't publication-quality, but they were pretty good.

If you're in an academic environment, your institution may have a site license that would allow you to install it for free on your computer, and to use it so long as you're on campus.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:20 AM on October 7, 2016

Best answer: I'm a mathematician. I'm not sure if you're looking to make notes for yourself (e.g., you're talking about a research notebook) or if you're talking about taking notes in class. If it's in class, I don't see how LaTeX + anything is possibly going to be fast enough. I'm really fast at LaTeX at this point, and it's still much, much slower than handwriting. And graphics production---even if you're doing something like hacking together a diagram in your vector drawing program of choice (or even drawing it by hand) and exporting as a PDF and importing into your LaTeX file, rather than TiKZ or something, is super slow. Graphics production is always the slowest part of writing up papers, for me. (well, after actually figuring out what I need to prove and proving stuff.)

As of August, I've started using an iPadPro (big) + Apple Pencil. I can't tell you how nice it is. It's really, really nice. I can take notes in various notebooks (app-wise, I'm currently using Noteshelf; I've heard good things about Microsoft OneNote and GoodNotes as well). I can mark up PDFs---and the easy erasing feature turns out to be pretty helpful, since when I figure something out I can just erase it rather than having it junk up my annotation. The app I'm using does have a "turn on shapes" mode, which gets you straight lines and circles, at least. It does great with the handwriting. This app doesn't have a search text feature, but I know there are others that do. I can import from Dropbox, and export to Dropbox.

I use my iPad for research notes, for committee notes, for lecture notes. I really am impressed by how much I like it (Mind you, it's crazy expensive---I had some money on a grant---for what i'm treating as essentially a glorified notebook, where I can also check email and look things up on the web. And do basic calculations crappily, via sage or wolframalpha or something. But still, mostly I'm using it as a notebook. But it works really well.) The iPadPro + apple pencil really feels like (slippery) pen and paper.

A bunch of these apps also have the feature where you can type and then draw at the same time---is that the sort of thing you want? (I write pretty fast, so I'm more likely to want to just handwrite than type.) But I don't know of any that also have LaTeXing capabilities (expect I guess maybe ONeNote, from the folks above?). That'd be cool.

Regarding Mathematica, or Sage, you certainly can do some typesetting stuff interspersed with text, so that might be a way to go depending on what you're trying to accomplish. I think a student license for Mathematica is about $45/semester, so it's totally affordable to try out.

For what it's worth, this semester as an instructor, I'm LaTeXing up my lecture slides in beamer, with lots of holes, then importing them onto my iPad, projecting them in class and writing on them with the PDF annotation+apple pencil, and then exporting the annotated slides to post on Blackboard. From a technological standpoint, it works great; I haven't decided if I like it pedagogically.

There are "TeX handwriting" apps (e.g., TeXPad). They might let you copy-paste into another app. The one I have doesn't do matrices real well (or anything else complicated), so I've not really worked with it much. But if you went the tablet route, that might help in terms of getting typeset stuff quickly into where you're working.
posted by leahwrenn at 9:53 AM on October 7, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've used a Wacom tablet, Livescribe and Evernote and none really worked for me.

This summer, I bought the iPad Pro (the smaller) with the pencil, and holy crap did it change my life. Yes, it was expensive, but I found that not only does it do all the things I needed, but it also inspired me to start drawing again. I almost didn't get it, but I am SO SO glad I did.

Seriously - it's worth the investment.
posted by guster4lovers at 9:27 PM on October 7, 2016

I use an iPad Pro, a pencil and Good Notes - I don't do math, but I do a lot of visual note taking, and good notes has a decent enough handwritten text recorgnition that I often just use that, copy/paste the drawings/schemas etc and then do a pass correcting the mistakes before storing it as a PDF. The apple pencil works way better than other styluses in my experience, especially at palm rejection.
posted by motdiem2 at 4:45 AM on October 10, 2016