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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

#21

Post by nonrandomstring »

hollerith wrote: post #14
533474 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

What does org mode have to do with the problem where you have a document open in a PDF viewer and you want to retrieve the location of the document in the file system and what page is currently showing in the viewer's window?

If you're using Org-ref, and have used that to drill down into your pdfs then you always have the document context (and bibtex etc context) from within emacs. But I don't think that is the OPs use case, so apologies for the noise. Also careful use of unix find with pdfgrep can be handy.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#22

Post by mistrial9 »

amathres_info wrote: post #19

I'm another academic mathematician. I'm not really convinced that all this would be a time-saver for me as far as research productivity; maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes and that's it. But certainly this could vary from person to person. To me, the place for the real time savings is organizing your teaching workflow. If you're a grad student, make sure to get on top of that A…

> maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes

paper, like.. pieces of paper.. yes, that is old-fashioned! however, in deep math, maybe this is something.. I was told after attending a world-class lecture week in pure math, that it is common for PhDs and post-docs in math to have very little to talk about between each other.. since their interest and subject area is almost certainly deeply buried in some specialty. Aside from the quip "all roads lead to cryptography" perhaps just an excuse for certain people, I can see how this "different worlds" problem in post-doc math might be real..

The fellow writing this post is first-year however.. maybe its different.. Also I just cloned and built pdfgrep .. I am definitely going to try that out immediately .. thx!

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#23

Post by t_mann »

retskrad wrote: post #9

I 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.

Grad School in most STEM fields will look equally gibberish to you, so your question is almost like asking "Why do people do research?". The answer is to learn things that we didn't know before. In most STEM fields it's about how the world works, in math you discover eternal truths, which is pretty cool too.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#24

Post by joeman1000 »

rcap wrote: post #2

Author 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…

The solution is emacs. I know you’ve got a lot invested in vim already. You can get instant LaTeX rendering with AUCTeX, view the pdf in emacs with pdf-tools, which can be used with something like org-ref (there are many bibliography packages) to query a db with the DOI of the pdf. (Try saying that two times fast). This EmacsConf talk should give you a taste of what I mean:

https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/research/

Your old post with instantly rendering latex snippets actually inspired me to start using vim/LaTeX. This opened up a whole new world for me. I started programming, got back into my engineering degree, started using emacs/org-mode and have nearly finished the degree. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I hadn’t seen your post. It revealed a way of using computers that I had never seen before.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#25

Post by mhh__ »

retskrad wrote: post #9

I 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.

Why do people climb mountains? "Because it's there"

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#26

Post by joeman1000 »

hollerith wrote: post #14
533474 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

What does org mode have to do with the problem where you have a document open in a PDF viewer and you want to retrieve the location of the document in the file system and what page is currently showing in the viewer's window?

The fact that pdf-tools (in emacs) makes this an utterly trivial task.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#27

Post by benibela »

godelski wrote: post #6

Does 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…

I have the best reference. I ask Till Tantau when I have any urgent tikz questions.

The advantage of working at the university of Lübeck: his office is next to my office.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#28

Post by mhh__ »

amathres_info wrote: post #19

I'm another academic mathematician. I'm not really convinced that all this would be a time-saver for me as far as research productivity; maybe I'm just old-fashioned but I just have a few folders for paper notes and that's it. But certainly this could vary from person to person. To me, the place for the real time savings is organizing your teaching workflow. If you're a grad student, make sure to get on top of that A…

For me at least my reasoning for trying new things to make notes with is that I very very rarely actually read them again, so I need to get as much learning done from writing the notes, and to do that I need to write more notes e.g. make writing the notes fun.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#29

Post by govg »

retskrad wrote: post #9

I 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.

You could say that about practically anything in academia, especially sciences and engineering. Not to mention, most code of big organizations would look like gibberish to an amateur programmer, the Linux kernel would look meaningless to someone starting to code etc.

Re: My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing

#30

Post by godelski »

ivansavz wrote: post #16
godelski wrote: post #6

Does 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…

The best way to TikZ is to copy-paste from previous figures you've created. The second best is to look for a similar figure on TeXample https://texample.net/tikz/examples/ or stack overflow https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/tikz-pgf The third best option is to use squared paper to draw by hand, then transfer hand-drawn stuff into TikZ code. It's slow as hell, but works well if you build up a collection o…

I know you're trying to be helpful, but the first two best options you suggest are already things I do. For the third, I'm not sure those are great options either since really it isn't the translating hand drawings to tikz that's the issue (the examples are pretty brute force too. Though I can see some use cases for mathcha.

I am more looking for tips and tricks that have helped people build their skills and streamline the process.

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