Managing LaTeX lecture notes

This repository complements the original author's third blog post about his and my note taking setup.

Changes

Based on this.

This fork aims to remove stuff that makes it unnecessary complex like the google calendar integration. But on the other hand add features to make it more effective.

The programs used will also change from rofi to dmenu and from polybar also to dwmblocks. dmenu will be usable under all unix variants and the dwm statusbar will be a script so that one can also embed it into other bars.

File structure

ROOT
├── riemann-surfaces
│   ├── info.yaml
│   ├── master.tex
│   ├── lec_01.tex
│   ├── ...
│   ├── lec_13.tex
│   ├── figures
│   │   ├── analytical-continuation-algebraic-equations.pdf
│   │   ├── analytical-continuation-algebraic-equations.pdf_tex
│   │   ├── analytical-continuation-algebraic-equations.svg
│   │   └── ...
│   └── UltiSnips
│       └── tex.snippets
├── selected-topics
└── ...

Contents of info.yaml

title: 'Riemann Surfaces'
short: 'RSurf'
url: 'https://'

Contents of master.tex:

\documentclass[]{report}
\input{~/notes/preamble.tex}
...
\title{Riemann surfaces}
\begin{document}
    \maketitle
    \tableofcontents
    \clearpage
    % start lecture
    \input{lec_01.tex}
    ...
    \input{lec_12.tex}
    % end lectures
\end{document}

Here % start lectures and % end lectures are important.

A lecture file contains a line

\lecture{1}{02-06-2024}{Introduction to our current Techno-Feudalism}

which is the lecture number, date an title of the lecture. Date format is configurable in config.py.

init-all-courses.py

This is the first file you should run. After creating the directory and the info.yaml file for each course, it creates all master.tex files.

config.py

This is where you configure the root folder of the file structure, and similar stuff. You can also configure the date format used in some places (lecture selection dialog and LaTeX files).

courses.py

This file defines Course and Courses. Courses is a list of Courses in the ROOT folder. A Course is a python object that represents a course. It has a name, a path, and some info (which reads from info.yaml). You can also access its lectures.

Courses also has a current property which points to the current course. When setting this property, the script updates the ~/current_course symlink to point to the current course (configurable in config.py) Furthermore, it writes the short course code to /tmp/current_course. This way, when using dwmblocks, polybar or most other similar statusbars you can add the script to show the current course short code in your panel.

dwmblocks

will arrive shortly

polybar

[module/currentcourse]
interval = 5
type = custom/script
tail = true
exec = cat /tmp/current_course

lectures.py

This file defines Lectures, the lectures for one course and Lecture, a single lecture file lec_xx.tex. A Lecture has a title, date, week, which get parsed from the LaTeX source code. It also has a reference to its course. When calling .edit() on a lecture, it opens up lecture in Vim.

Lectures a is class that inherits from list that represents the lectures in one course. It has a method new_lecture which creates a new lecture, update_lectures_in_master, which when you call with [1, 2, 3] updates master.tex to include the first three lectures, compile_master which compiles the master.tex file.

dmenu-courses.py

When you run this file, it opens dmenu which allows you to activate a course.

dmenu-lectures.py

When you run this file, it will show you lectures of the current course. Selecting one opens up the file in Vim, pressing | creates a new lecture.

dmenu-lectures-view.py

This opens up a rofi dialog to update which lectures are included in master.tex

Defined options are current lecture, last two lectures, all lectures and previous lectures.

dmenu.py

Wrapper function for dmenu.

utils.py

Some utility functions.

compile-all-masters.py

This script updates the master.tex files to include all lectures and compiles them. I use it when syncing my notes to other devices.

issues and prs are most welcome