which document style to write course lecture notes latex

by Ethan Paucek MD 6 min read

To begin, LaTeX class file for lecture notes you can find the class file I wrote for my notes. Just put it in you LaTeX tree (or in the directory of your document), with the sty file, and write a document with the following structure.

Full Answer

How to make a LaTeX class file for lecture notes?

To begin, LaTeX class file for lecture notes you can find the class file I wrote for my notes. Just put it in you LaTeX tree (or in the directory of your document), with the sty file, and write a document with the following structure. Obviously you have to replace the values, or, when appropriate, delete some line.

What program do you use to write in latex?

For writ­ing text and math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las in LaTeX, I use Vim. Vim is a pow­er­ful gen­er­al pur­pose text ed­i­tor that’s very ex­ten­si­ble. I use it for writ­ing code, LaTeX, mark­down, … ba­si­cal­ly every­thing that’s text-​based.

Can you take notes in LaTeX using just report class?

More importantly depends on how many graphics, formulas you have in the notes and how quickly you are at typing those up (since typing those is the slowest of all). I personally did take notes in latex using just report class. I would it great to type up syllabus beforehand for the whole year such that I can predict headings more precisely.

How to create a note taker in latex?

Just put it in you LaTeX tree (or in the directory of your document), with the sty file, and write a document with the following structure. Obviously you have to replace the values, or, when appropriate, delete some line. Note that “author” and “email” are name and e-mail of the notes taker. The options (see the first line) are these:

Is LaTeX good for note taking?

To make note taking using LaTeX viable, I had four goals in mind: Writing text and mathematical formulas in LaTeX should be as fast as the lecturer writing on a blackboard: no delay is acceptable. Drawing figures should be almost as fast as the lecturer.

How do you make notes in LaTeX?

18:0021:40Digital Note Taking Tutorial (Setting up Atom and LaTeX) - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipAnd you can see me doing that in my recording. However it's it's pretty difficult especially to doMoreAnd you can see me doing that in my recording. However it's it's pretty difficult especially to do it in real time and you have to press a lot of buttons really.

How do you create a document class in LaTeX?

To write a document class, all you need (really) is to create a file, say, myclass. cls , and put it in the same place as your document; then it can be loaded with \documentclass{myclass} and any macros defined in it will be available to the document.

What is the use of document class in LaTeX?

The documentclass sets up what type of document you are working with, loads many default styles and sets the overall look and feel of your document. There are also class specific commands which have are only valid in certain document classes.

How do you write footnotes in LaTeX?

You can insert a footnote marker using the \verb|\footnotemark|\footnotemark{} command and later, when you're ready, typeset the footnote text by writing \verb|\footnotetext{Here's the footnote.} |. \footnotetext{Here's the footnote.}

How do you do lecture notes in math?

Here are a couple of tips for taking notes in the class.Listen in Class. Do not just write down what you see on the board. ... Write Down Explanatory Remarks. ... Note Important Formulas/Concepts. ... Question Your Instructor. ... Note Topics You Don't Understand. ... Review/Edit Your Notes. ... Review Regularly.

What are the different types of document class in LaTeX?

The three most commonly used standard document-classes in LaTeX include: article , report and book . A number of global options allows customization of certain elements of the document by the author. Different document-classes might have different default settings.

Which type of document can be created using LaTeX?

LaTeX is most commonly used to create documents for academia, such as academic journals. In LaTeX, the author doesn't stylize the document directly, like in a word processor such as Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Apple Pages; instead they write code in plain text that must be compiled to produce a PDF document.

What is a CLS file LaTeX?

File written in LaTeX, a document markup language often used for typesetting academic papers; stores a class with a predefined typeset configuration that can be imported into a . TEX document; used for storing templates for articles, forms, and other types of documents.

How do the LaTeX document classes book and article difference?

A “book” is always 2-sided whereas in a “report” or “article” you have to specify it by using the “twoside” option. In addition, in a “book” and “report” the “titlepage” and “abstract” will take a whole page each, which is not the case for “article”. In an “article”, you can use the options “titlepage” and “abstract”.

What is document structure in LaTeX?

LaTeX documents are a mixture of text and commands. The commands start with a backslash and sometimes have arguments in curly braces (or sometimes optional arguments in square brackets). Then you get an output PDF by telling LaTeX to typeset your file.

Which of the following document class is used for writing letters?

Document classesEditarticleFor articles in scientific journals, presentations, short reports, program documentation, invitations, ...memoirFor sensibly changing the output of the document. It is based on the book class, but you can create any kind of document with it [1]letterFor writing letters.7 more rows

Installing the class

Simply drop the .cls and .sty files into your LaTeX document tree. On UNIX systems this is usually ~/texmf/ and is C:\Users\user_name\texmf\ on Windows.

Working with the class

Your documents based on this lecture class must adhere to the following blueprint:

End notes

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE.md file for details.

Vim and LaTeX

For writ­ing text and math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las in LaTeX, I use Vim. Vim is a pow­er­ful gen­er­al pur­pose text ed­i­tor that’s very ex­ten­si­ble. I use it for writ­ing code, LaTeX, mark­down, … ba­si­cal­ly every­thing that’s text-​based.

Snippets

A snip­pet is a short reusable piece of text that can be trig­gered by some other text. For ex­am­ple, when I type sign and press Tab, the word sign will be ex­pand­ed to a sig­na­ture:

LaTeX snippets

Using snip­pets, writ­ing LaTeX is a lot faster than writ­ing it by hand. Es­pe­cial­ly some of the more com­plex snip­pets can save you a lot of time and frus­tra­tion. Let’s begin with some sim­ple snip­pets.

Correcting spelling mistakes on the fly

While in­sert­ing math­e­mat­ics is an im­por­tant part of my note-​taking setup, most of the time I’m typ­ing Eng­lish. At about 80 words per minute, my typ­ing skills are not bad, but I still make a lot of typos. This is why I added a key­bind­ing to Vim that cor­rects the spelling mis­takes, with­out in­ter­rupt­ing my flow.

In conclusion

Using snip­pets in Vim, writ­ing LaTeX is no longer an an­noy­ance, but rather a plea­sure. In com­bi­na­tion with spell check on the fly, it al­lows for a com­fort­able math­e­mat­i­cal note-​taking setup. A few pieces are miss­ing though, for ex­am­ple draw­ing fig­ures dig­i­tal­ly and em­bed­ding them in a LaTeX doc­u­ment.

File structure

Let’s first talk about the file struc­ture of my lec­ture notes. Cur­rent­ly, it’s or­ga­nized as fol­lows:

Automatically changing the active course

As men­tioned ear­li­er, the ac­tive course changes au­to­mat­i­cal­ly based on my sched­ule. The script that’s in con­trol for that also shows some rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion to my sta­tus bar, for which I’m using poly­bar . It turned out to be quite use­ful, es­pe­cial­ly know­ing what room the next lec­ture is in.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I’ve dis­cussed a num­ber of things, all of which some­how con­tribute to my lec­ture man­age­ment: shared pre­am­ble, current-​course sym­link, info.yaml, bundling up and cre­at­ing lec­tures, my fig­ure and snip­pet setup, and my sta­tus bar. Al­to­geth­er they allow for a smooth and ef­fi­cient note-​taking ex­pe­ri­ence.