Intelligent Note Taking

Günther Hutter has a nice post on taking notes that can be exported to a nice looking document. His strategy is to use markdown to take the notes and then use pandoc to export them to $LATEX$ and produce a PDF output. His post has an example of the input and output.

Karl Voit saw Hutter’s tweet pointing to the post and responded with

@oe6gue @elmarkrainz Agreed. When you're switching from #markdown to #Emacs + #Orgmode you'll get auto time-stamps + MORE as well.

— n0v0id (@n0v0id) July 14, 2016

That’s exactly right, I think. Org mode offers many advantages including the (semi-)automatic insertion of time stamps as documented in Rainer König’s excellent video on Org timers.

Org mode can facilitate the process in other ways too. For example, the export workflow is slightly easier because Org’s already set up to export to $LATEX$ and even automatically produce the PDF all from within Emacs. If you find yourself taking the same type of notes often, you can set up a template that has all the boiler plate already in it so you can concentrate of taking notes rather than bookkeeping.