December 5, 2011

Livescribe notebooks for lab work

Buyers should be aware that many of the dot paper offering from Livescribe are tiny (A5) notebooks rather than the letter or A4 sized notebooks most folks are probably used to working with.  Larger notebooks are available though.  The two optimal offerings are:

These may be cheaper through Amazon.  I just figured I'd point this out since there exist people who've purchased smaller notebooks and been surprised (as judged by Amazon comments).

December 4, 2011

Small utility to easily incorporate LaTeX equations in Evernote (or anything else)

I realize that such utilities already exist and that I'm not a good programmer, but this does exactly what I want and nothing more.  Click on the following link to download a lightweight program what converts TeX snippets into a pasteable image by utilizing the Google Chart service.

Download TeXer (updated to fix a bug with Windows XP on 12/05/2011)

Note:  This application requires the full .NET Framework 4.

When you first launch it, you will be presented with the following:


Press a key to set the global hotkey and you will be presented with this:


By pressing the hotkey-combination, you can show/hide this window.  You can set a new hotkey by pressing the "Set hotkey button".

Type some TeX into the textbox and an output image will be fetched and displayed.  This image will be automatically placed in your clipboard.  The image size can be controlled with the image height control:

Type your TeX
Paste the result!
Press Ctrl-Enter after done typing to hide the window (or use the hotkey).  The following procedure can be used to rapidly get an image of an equation into your Evernote post:

  1. Press the hotkey you assigned to show the program.
  2. Type the TeX.
  3. Ctrl-Enter
  4. Paste the image
A list of previously typed TeX snippets is recorded in the history dropdown box so you can get back to whatever you might've been working on before without having to retype everything.  Hopefully some will find this useful!