That's awful. I probably have hundreds of pages of notes in this thing. Time to mass PDF export.
I have been using it for about 15 years so am in the same situation. I haven't found a suitable alternative yet. Annoyingly they're going to EOL the cloud connectivity for it in 2023 and then the product in 2025. I've taken all my notebooks offline and will deal with it at some point, probably in 2025 :D
Are you referring to EOL for desktop version or OneNote entirely?
Glad to see this at the top, agree 100%. I’m definitely going to copy some of OP’s setting and snippets, but not for real time use during a lecture. A textbook is an infinitely better reference than any notes one could take in class. Read the damn book. Lecture time should be for asking questions when you have a freaking live expert professor literally presenting the material to you. Ask all the small, nuanced questi…
That's fine amd dandy from a US perspective, but many European universities are different. I don't know about this guy's exact class, but some (many?) undergrad classes are 500 people in a lecture hall with the professor orating, no textbook, and the content on the exam is pretty much whatever was covered during the lectures. So accurate note taking is very important because those notes essentially are your textbook.…
Undergrad maths classes with 500 people? That must be one hell of a course. Either way, all undergrad classes I attended in Germany were based on some kind of textbook (usually (co-)authored by the lecturer, and occasionally self-published, i.e. as photocopies of a set of more or less neatly typewritten pages, with equations scrawled in by hand).
I have been using it for about 15 years so am in the same situation. I haven't found a suitable alternative yet. Annoyingly they're going to EOL the cloud connectivity for it in 2023 and then the product in 2025. I've taken all my notebooks offline and will deal with it at some point, probably in 2025 :D
Are you referring to EOL for desktop version or OneNote entirely?
EOL for old desktop version. There's a new terribly crippled UWP desktop version and the cloud based web app available going forwards. They are absolutely terrible bits of software compared to the old desktop version.
>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. As if the average modern day student is going to do this. I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally. More on topic, the standar…
> As if the average modern day student is going to do this. This is the problem. Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast. Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years. Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a…
Ditto, EE too. I bought a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun just for the great table of Laplace Transforms.
If I were a professor, I’d ban all electronics from the room. All the decent professors handed out copies of the notes anyway, or wrote them in real-time on an overhead projector, for easy copying later.
I want to ask about the converse of this article. I teach at a college. I make presentations using LaTeX. I like to imagine that one advantage is that students can suck them off the intranet and work from them.
I want to ask if this is common. Do students not find that other people do it?
I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure…
It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop.
As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow…
I remember things much better if I write them down during a lecture, rather than just listen. I seldom actually used my notes afterwards beyond a quick recap, except in a few classes where the lecturer had prepared the lecture very well. Still, just writing it down allowed me to remember better by orders of magnitude.
Beautiful tricks for writing efficiently in LaTeX. But I just hate to take notes during lectures. I prefer if the professor gives the printed notes and then you need just to add small annotations, if anything.
I took notes using emacs and LaTeX in similar fashion. But I started by doing all of my assignments with it until I became proficient enough. I can type much faster than I write. I didn’t use any Elisp to help — though I probably should have in retrospect. I did have some common LaTeX macros/commands. It was nice to have the notes to study from in the end.
This helped most in doing assignments and is what I’d recommend to others. I would write by pencil and paper then type as LaTeX. This forced me to review my solutions and fix mistakes or improve them.
I didn’t attempt to get too fancy with plots in real-time (I kept a notebook for those courses) but I did do graph theory and commutative diagrams (category theory) with tikz.
> As if the average modern day student is going to do this. This is the problem. Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast. Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years. Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a…
Ditto, EE too. I bought a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun just for the great table of Laplace Transforms. If I were a professor, I’d ban all electronics from the room. All the decent professors handed out copies of the notes anyway, or wrote them in real-time on an overhead projector, for easy copying later.
Then you'd be a terrible professor, because that attitude is not pro-learning. Students take their own notes because writing is an aid to memory. Students take electronic notes because those notes are easier to organise, edit, and search through. Many "decent" professors will not hand out notes, and the writings they put on the projector might be scanned and put online, but those writings have none of the benefits of actually typeset notes. Moreover, since you would ban electronics, students couldn't access those scans in a later lecture anyways.