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https://github.com/alfredholmes/TeXNotes

Zettelkasten or Slip box with notes written in LaTeX
https://github.com/alfredholmes/TeXNotes

latex latex-template zettelkasten

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Zettelkasten or Slip box with notes written in LaTeX

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# TeXNotes - Zettelkasten written with LaTeX.

Zettelkasten or Slip box with notes written in LaTeX. 



![Screenshot from 2023-10-09 19-34-59](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/assets/10376110/661103ed-2a1e-45db-bcc5-faf805133d7d)



### Getting Started



See [wiki/getting started](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Getting-Started) for instructions. See [/docs/manage.html](https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/blob/main/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](https://www.freelists.org/list/latexzettel) or send an email with subject 'subscribe' to [email protected].



### Current Features



* [Internote referencing commands](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Referencing-Other-Notes) - render Zettelkasten with PDFLaTeX or make4ht and get clickable hyperlinks in the PDFs and html pages.

* [Biber support](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Biber-Support) for citations (works well with, for example, Zotero auto export).

* [Helper scripts](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Creating,-Deleting-and-Renaming-Notes) 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](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Network-View)).

* Ability to export multiple notes into a LaTeX document ([see here](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Export-Notes-as-Latex-Document)). 

* [PDF and HTML rendering](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/wiki/Compiling-Notes)

* [Markdown support with Pandoc](https://github.com/alfredholmes/TeXNotes/wiki/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](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/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 `pdf`s, 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 `pdf`s 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 

```Latex

\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](https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/blob/main/docs/manage.html) for documentation.



### Donations / Support



Please report any bugs or feature requests to the repository [issues](https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel/issues). If you find the project useful, please consider buying me a [coffee](https://ko-fi.com/mildobsessions).