My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
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Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#2Author here, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them.
It really is amazing how hard it is just to retrieve the currently opened pdf file and its page number in a pdf viewer. Some pdf viewers (Like Zathura) provide this via DBus, but even very common ones like Evince don't. I managed to find a way using gvfs, although it's a bit of a hack.
For others (e.g. Mendeley), I have no idea on how to do this... Anybody have ideas? it is Qt based, maybe I can hook into that via some debugging tool?
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#3Author here, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. It really is amazing how hard it is just to retrieve the currently opened pdf file and its page number in a pdf viewer. Some pdf viewers (Like Zathura) provide this via DBus, but even very common ones like Evince don't. I managed to find a way using gvfs, although it's a bit of a hack. For others (e.g. Mendeley), I have no idea on how to do this... Anybod…
I guess it will be easier to get it working with Zotero, as it's open source, and I think it even supports custom plug-ins.
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#4Specifically being able to create a deep link to a passage is a very powerful capability indeed. The friction required to look up a paper and navigate to the specific passage for a given reference can really be so high that we just end up avoiding it altogether I feel. Kudos to you for trying to solve this problem!
I personally find LaTeX a little too friction-full (is that a word?) on the input side. The output looks beautiful but the lack of feedback when writing stuff keeps me from actually adding stuff to it. Although your daily notes seems like it might help with this tendency a little bit.
This is a problem I'm currently trying to solve with my current project (https://topictrails.com/ if you're interested).
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#5I just wish there was a good way to have something like Zeal[1] for PDFs. Navigating a big pile of huge datasheets and manuals (a processor TRM can be 5000 pages!) is such a huge pain and that's assuming they have decent TOCs, which many do not.
[1]: https://zealdocs.org
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#6Does anyone have a good reference for Tikz? I feel like I'm pretty good at it (at least better than most my peers) but I also believe it takes a significant amount of time to create interesting pictures and do even basic things that PPT or other basic tools can do easily. I want the full editing power of tikz but doing the basic parts is tough (same with manim, though lower barrier to entry).
As for writing documents with lots of math, absolutely no problem. I can churn that our faster than peers can with Word.
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#7Specifically being able to create a deep link to a passage is a very powerful capability indeed. The friction required to look up a paper and navigate to the specific passage for a given reference can really be so high that we just end up avoiding it altogether I feel. Kudos to you for trying to solve this problem! I personally find LaTeX a little too friction-full (is that a word?) on the input side. The output look…
Personally for feedback I use editors like overleaf or the extension for vscode that autocompilea and displays a PDF next to the working TeX file. I prefer it over something like LyX or waiting to compile manually.
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#8You may also want to check out sioyek which is an open source PDF viewer specifically designed for reading research papers and textbooks.
https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek
Disclaimer: I am the developer of sioyek
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#9I looked at the math in the article and I asked myself, what compels people to choose this path for their career? Nothing about it looks appealing. It looks like a bunch of gibberish for 99% of humanity and only 1% of people willingly go to school to learn this stuff. I have a lot of respect for people who have jobs involving this level of math and physics so dummies like me have the ability to type out this comment.
Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing
#10Author here, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. It really is amazing how hard it is just to retrieve the currently opened pdf file and its page number in a pdf viewer. Some pdf viewers (Like Zathura) provide this via DBus, but even very common ones like Evince don't. I managed to find a way using gvfs, although it's a bit of a hack. For others (e.g. Mendeley), I have no idea on how to do this... Anybod…
Try emacs and org-mode sometime. Configurability is off the charts and vi keybindings are easily configurable (and so are the snippets). I loved the workflow, I believe that a mind like yours will also find emacs elisp captivating and I would love to see what you could come up with in that much more flexible ecosystem (I am a former Vim evangelist)