flownotes

A XeLaTex template for writing notes.

version 0.1

general philosophy

This template is essentially a digital version of the on-paper note-taking method that I have been using for years. I only use this method for heavy-knowledge-related purposes. For other purposes, I guess any notebook app today will do the work.

The note-taking philosophy is:

• All-in-one: applicable for most heavy-knowledge-related puporses: academic notes at school, technical notes at work, notes for personal hobbies/skills, notes for elaborated inspirations; you don't have to used different notebooks for different purposes
• Flexibility: notes for the same topic can be shattered at different places, and yet it is easy to review all of them;
• Easy to recall: for example, to have clear date records (people usually are good at recalling dates of their own activities, thus make recalling a note easier);
• Effectiveness for self-education:
  • Problem-oriented learning: learn by solving problems or answering questions;
  • Concept-oriented learning: learn by understanding key concepts with definitions and examples
  • Interest-oriented learning: learn the parts of the knowledge that you are most interested in first;
  • Cognition-oriented learning: learn by recording your own cognitive flow: write down exactly what you have in mind;
  • System-oriented learning: learn by organizing knowledge into a coherent systematic structure.

Volunteering contributors are welcomed as long as the above philosophy is followed.

features

• every note is put into a box with a label that shows the topic, date, the ordinal number of the note about the topic on that data. (formatting example: Music#2019100201)
• arrows to connect text bodies
• q&a boxes to facilitate problem-oriented learning
• beautiful typesetting for both Latin-letter-based languages (e.g., English, French, etc.) and CJK-character-based languages (e.g., Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean)

more features to come in the future

• single commands for flow charts, layer models, etc.
• typsetting for Arabic, Hebrew, etc.
• more free styles of arrow drawing to connect texts. ...

Usage and example

First, clone the project:

$ git clone https://github.com/eugene-yh/flownotes.git

Then, download fonts from here or here (psw: qigd). Decompress the file and put the fonts directory under the main directory. Run the following commands to compile the documentation:

$ cd flownotes
$ xelatex doc
$ bibtex doc
$ xelatex doc
$ xelatex doc    

The documentation is written in a note form, thus it can also serve as an example of this template.