TeXNotes - Zettelkasten written with LaTeX.

Zettelkasten or Slip box with notes written in LaTeX.

Getting Started

See wiki/getting started for instructions. See /docs/manage.html for documentation on the helper sript manage.py.

Mailing List

To receive email updates about new features and general information about the project, subscribe to the mailing list here or send an email with subject 'subscribe' to latexzettel-request@freelists.org.

Current Features

• Internote referencing commands - render Zettelkasten with PDFLaTeX or make4ht and get clickable hyperlinks in the PDFs and html pages.
• Biber support for citations (works well with, for example, Zotero auto export).
• Helper scripts to create new notes from LaTeX templates
• Automated analysis of the Zettelkasten - creates a database from the notes with details of the connections between notes.
• Native python 'network view' of Zettelkasten (see here).
• Ability to export multiple notes into a LaTeX document (see here).
• PDF and HTML rendering
• Markdown support with Pandoc

Planned Features

• Customizable templates, and different templates for different notes
• Draw a path on the network view to write a draft of a paper
• Import notes from an existing .tex file - split up already written documents into atomic notes by adding comments to the .tex file that describe the desired notes.

Why Do This?

This is primarily intended for academics who write papers in LaTeX and want to write notes using the Zettelkasten method that are easily exportable into a full LaTeX document. The other benefits are being able to define theorem environments and using biber or bibtex reference management. This repository is essentially a template to start a new slip box. There is a python script manage.py that adds a few functions but you could do this all in latex.

How to use

See the wiki for detailed usage instructions.

There are three main folders. /notes, /template and /pdf. This assumess that you want to render your notes as pdf documents rather than as html (html rendering also works, replacing pdflatex with make4ht but there are sometimes some issues with hyperref and xr-hyper which can be fixed by adding the flag -c ../config/make4ht.cfg). Inside /notes is where the .tex documents get stored. The example notes import the file /template/preamble which contains various package imports. The most important part of /template/preamble.tex is the importing of the file /notes/documents.tex which contains all the \externaldocument declarations that will allow \cref to reference equations in other documents. Note that the second parameter in the \externaldocument command is the name of the file that you want to reference. This is actually refers to the document_name.aux, which contains all the referencing information, rather than the .tex file. Hence this file name parameter should match the directory structure of the output pdfs, not the directory structure of your .tex documents. To allow all the notes to use the same /documents.tex it is most straightforward to render the pdfs from inside the /pdf directory. So to render notes using pdflatex run

$ cd pdf
$ pdflatex ../notes/path_to_note.tex 

If note A references note B, then you'll have to render B before A for the hyperlinks to work correctly.

Now you will have two pdfs (and a load of LaTeX build files) which give a basic example of the setup.

Adding New Notes

To add a new note simply run

$ ./manage.py newnote note_name [optional cref name, defaults to NoteName = name.split('_') then capitalized and concatenated].

this just copies the note template into the /notes/slipbox/ folder, saving it as new_note.tex and adds the line

\externaldocument[NewNote-]{new_note}

to /notes/documents.tex. Any labels from the note will be able to be referenced from other notes using the command

\excref[reference label]{NewNote}

which is defined in /template/preamble.tex. This will use cref to generate the label and insert \texttt{NewNote/} before it. Using just \cref{NewNote-reference label} use the default cref to render the reference to the label, and so willl not include the document name. To add custom text to the external reference there is the command

\exhyperref[reference label]{NewNote}{hyperlink text}

also defined in /template/preamble.tex. This creates a hyperlink to the item labelled reference label in new_note.tex with the text hyperlink text. If the optional parameter is ommited then \exhyperref and \excref will reference the label note which in the default template is inserted just after the title.

manage.py helper script

See /docs/manage.html for documentation.

Donations / Support

Please report any bugs or feature requests to the repository issues. If you find the project useful, please consider buying me a coffee.