| Don't kill me, but I actually took notes during math lectures using Word [1]. Since 2007 it has math support which you can either enter from the ribbon with lots of clicks (not recommended) or by typing something that for the most part resembles math in TeX, except that you use parentheses instead of curly braces and there are some smarts built-in that make typing much easier, simply because you're typing less, e.g. x^2y is equivalent to x^{2y} and a/b is equivalent to \frac{a}{b}. Symbols are for the most part the same as in TeX, e.g. \alpha, etc. The nicest thing of all that for interactive note-taking (at least for me) is that you see what you're entering. While you're typing you always get to see how it looks. This avoided (again, for me) many situations where I'd leave syntax errors in an equation just to get home and not remember where I'd forgot a closing brace. The worst thing to enter via the plain-text format are large matrices, though that's no different from TeX, IMHO. In this case using the GUI facilities to enter them can actually be faster. A (preliminary) description of the format they use can be found in Unicode Technical Note #28 [2], although that's not in all cases still the current implementation. Fun thing is, there is even a Math Input Panel in Windows which does pretty much the same as that web app: Convert hand-written math into MathML. You can then insert it into various applications (Word works fine, Mathematica too, I think – I guess anything that can handle Presentation MathML on paste or drag/drop). [3] [1] Sample: http://hypftier.de/files/uni/04/math/Vorlesungsmitschriften.... [2] http://unicode.org/notes/tn28/ [3] Excuse my horrible writing, but I have no pen on this machine: http://hypftier.de/temp/2016-01-13_080128.jpg – Clicking "Insert" while Word is focused, will then yield this: http://hypftier.de/temp/2016-01-13_080219.jpg (it even used the correct d (\dd) which has a small gap in the front and, depending on the font, can be upright) |
Hopefully my research will converge with work duties at some point and I'll be writing a single alpha source for the very technical stuff.