Note taking software that can support advanced math notation

Question

I'm trying to keep a large collection of GCSE notes for every subject I study, being 10 subjects.

I will be using fairly advanced math notation so I would like it to support some system like latex or mathml.

I want to be able to export notes to PDF for later revision and wiki style cross-links would be nice but not absolutely necessary.

I have already considered wikimedia and latex. I believe latex is too document based and linking and expanding ideas would be hard. Wikimedia, I feel might be a bit 'much' as some pages could simply be a sentence or two long and I want to spend time learning subjects not how to structure a wiki page.

So that all said, which note taking methods would you suggest?

Solution

Give Zim a try, it has a fairly good equation insertion plugin, you enter latex code and the corresponding equation is rendered in the document, you can right click the equation and edit the underlying Latex code as well. Zim has an export to latex feature that will create a latex file that you can run to create nice pdfs of your notes.

Read about it here

A screenshots:

latest deb to install available here:

http://zim-wiki.org/downloads/

Another tool for this kind of work is Emacs Org Mode, it is very strong on tables and will allow you to use latex equations in the text, though not rendered. all notes can be exported to latex which can then be compiled to pdf, good looking equations and tables will be in your pdfs.

Links about Emacs Org Mode:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/OrgMode

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Comments

[Simon]

If you go for LaTeX the following notes on how to make it more efficient might interest you: askubuntu.com/questions/60311/…

[enzotib]

+1, interesting, but why do not mention it is available in the official ubuntu repos?

[Sabacon]

Should have done that, sorry, the deb at the site is more current though.