Why write in Obsidian

There are drawbacks to writing in Obsidian for taking notes for Mathematics and Sciences - be it lecture notes or long-term notes. There are two other possibilities:

• taking notes in full-on LaTeX and keeping them as PDFs §

  • This is certainly not for everyone.
  • One can even compile topic-wise notes and embed them onto Obsidian notes:
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  • The epitome of this would be How I’m able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim | Gilles Castel.
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• handwriting them digitally completely and keeping them as PDFs §

  • This requires a stylus/pen equipped device.
  • Again, we can embed the PDFs:
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Writing in Obsidian using MathJax, Callouts and Excalidraw plugin §

But Obsidian with MathJax, Callouts and Excalidraw plugin provides the perfect balance between the two:

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further benefits §

Writing in Obsidian in this way provides benefits over each of the individual methods, and more:

• MathJax is as strong as full-on LaTeX. §

  • LaTeX preambles, snippets, conceal, etc. are available from community plugins.
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  • There is a plugin for TikZ diagrams too in Obsidian!
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• Obsidian notes and the entire vault is dynamic and inter-connectable. §

  • Between lectures, one can directly link to previously written notes, to specific pages in documents in the vault. One can embed them too! To me, this is a superpower! Live preview has made this even better!
  • In long-term notes, block-embedding callouts is also very nifty:
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• Obsidian notes are plain-text. §

  • That has benefits over storing the content of the notes as PDFs.

• Dynamic queries §

  • Dataview queries can help create a dynamic table of lecture note details, anything you want to display.
  • I used a parameter “topic” in the front-matter to list all topics discussed in the lecture.
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  • Tags, tasks can be used intelligently to make use of the dynamic queries!

• Drawing and diagrams §

  • Excalidraw plugin is a active-in-development plugin and even without a drawing device, it can be used to draw figures, flowcharts and also can be used to hand-write notes!

advantages over other tools §

• OneNote
  • Embedding notes, LaTeX, and way more functionality from plugins.
  • Plaintext.
  • Files like PDF doesn’t loose being “files”.
  • PDFs can be edited externally, linked/embedded to exact page number.
• Notion
  • Fast. Offline.
  • Local.
• Most other tools
  • Free!

other advantages §

• Various tools can be used alongside it. Any text editor like VScode, Atom etc.

Footnotes §

1. Zettelkasten + LaTeX + VS Code = Productivity++ ? | by Xavier Pinho | Level Up Coding (gitconnected.com) ↩