Go to this site for the 2024 version of this diary.
This repo contains a template book with 365 blank tex files, one for each day of the year. These tex files are collated and rendered into a PDF with latex and bibtex compilers. It is set up for 2023. It is configured to generate the following automatically:
- Chapter headings and section headings (add subsections and lower in your daily writing).
- Chapters and sections are automatically numbered.
- Table of Contents, hyperlinked
- References Cited, hyperlinked
- Index, hyperlinked
- Lists of code listings, hyperlinked
- List of Figures, hyperlinked
- List of Tables, hyperlinked
- An appendix that uses chapters that are arranged in alphabetical order by letters instead of numbers.
- Page numbers
- Epigraphs for Chapter header pages
- URLs in footnotes to prevent them from running into the right margin.
- Syntax highlighting of code via the minted package
- Supports the use of equations with captions (i.e., makes it possible to generate lists of equations).
The document is based on the Springer book format, but it has a 7 by 9-inch area for writing and conservative margins to save paper.
This can be used for the following purposes:
- diary
- laboratory notebook
- log book
- managing todo lists and plans
- provide material for an autobiography, biography, or to stimulate nonfiction and fiction books.
- to document one's life to inspire one's descendants
- storage site for daily writing on sites like 750words.com
This document's design was stimulated by the last use. I wanted an independent place to store my daily writing on 750words.com, where it is stored in plain text files that are hard to search. I wanted that writing to be indexable and searchable in a single PDF for a calendar year rather than 365 files. This document has been very useful for finding information, including data wrangling protocols and computer code, that I used in the past. It can gather information for annual reports if used as a "Captian's log" of one's personal Enterprise. For example, lists of accomplishments can be stored in the Appendices.
I have been using something like this since 2012, and this document has been in its current format since 2015. Each year's document has run about 1000-1200 pages in length. It is part of my daily routine to paste the day's writing into this document before retiring for the day or first thing in the following morning.
Writing in LaTeX has some limitations:
- The document is limited by computer RAM to one year.
- The document is limited by RAM regarding the number of lists and indices that can be generated simultaneously.
- Debugging can sometimes involve commenting out chapters in the 0AAAContent document to isolate the error.
Not to worry! The debugger on Overleaf will locate the bug by document name and line number. A click on an arrow will take you to the bug in the correct file.
I generally fall behind on my debugging and will comment out earlier chapters to prevent their errors from stopping compiling. I debug the old writing occasionally during the year when I am too tired to do anything else and during winter break before the start of the new year.
The main.tex document is fed to the compiler.
Compile with lualatex and the -escape-shell key (for the minted package).
The compile.sh script runs at the top level of the folder 2023diary, which you can rename.
The document is easy to compile with the click of a button using the Overleaf website.
The empty shell document takes several seconds to compile.
A 1000-page document will be compiled in about 60 seconds.
This long compile time is another advantage of the modular approach as opposed to having everything in one tex file. I comment out the inactive months in the 0AAAContents.tex file to shorten the compile time to a few seconds.
The 0AAAContents.tex file is the central nervous system of the document. It is trival to comment out entire chapters via a single percent sign. It is also trivial in Emacs to shuffle the order of the chapters by moving lines up or down. You can add prose to the 0AAAContents.tex file, but I find it adds clutter to this file.
- Edit the title and author at the top of the A000Contents.tex file in the Content subfolder.
- Change the cover figure to suit by loading a new image into the ./Content/Figures subfolder and by editing the path to the image to specify this new figure. Some image file formats like tiff are not supported. Png and PDF are reliable.
- Comment out the lists you do not intend to use in 0AAAContent. For example, if you do not save computer code, the list of listings will not be used.
- Add new appendices like your annual plan as a text file.
The documents to be edited are in chapter subfolders in the Content subfolders. Each day's entry is in a separate tex file. Navigate to the file corresponding to the current date and write on line two. The code on the first line must remain in place for the document to compile.
Each file forms a section of a chapter. This book has one chapter per month. All sections for a month are in a chapter subfolder in the Content folder.
I recommend using the online editor Overleaf for the smoothest operation. I have been editing this document on Overleaf for six years. You do NOT have to run each of the steps of compiling separately. You just click a button, and the latex and bibtex compilers are run seamlessly. I store the URL for this project on my private home page for rapid access.
You can compile the entire document with any document open in the text area because the main document is set in the menu panel on the left. This menu is also where you configure the compiler, key bindings, color theme, etc.
In terms of local editing, there are many (>20) freely available text editors that are highly supported for editing documents in LaTeX. The following are perhaps the most popular general-purpose editors that have great support for LaTeX:
- TextMate for the Mac (very easy to compile with
cmd-R) - Sublime Text
- VSC
- Vim
- Emacs
TextMate for the Mac does not get enough love these days. It starts lightning fast. I open the editor most frequently, although I am trying to migrate to Emacs.
Thanks to elisp and a dedicated developer community, Emacs is the most configurable editor.
Must be configured to use laulatex and -escape-shell.
It might be easiest to call the shell with M-! and enter compile.sh, main.tex to compile and open in your default PDF viewer.
Or just run the compile.sh script externally to Emacs.
See the latex-emacs repo for a sample configuration.
If you have citations, you will have to run bibtex on main.tex.
The Google Chrome extension GhostText supports using several kinds of local editors to edit text areas in web browsers. The opened toadayDate.tex file is a text area in Overleaf. You can bring your favorite LaTeX snippets to bear on Overleaf, which does not support snippets directly.
For example, I start the day by opening Emacs, logging into 750words, and clicking on the GhostText icon to open the connection to Emacs.
In Emacs in the Write your words buffer, I enter start and hit TAB or C-o.
This action inserts the following boilerplate from the start snippet file, which is available above.
I have configured the Emacs package atomic-chrome to open Write your words in the latex-mode so that I can have access to my latex-mode snippets, which are available here.
\subsection{Last night}
change me
\subsection{This morning}
change me
\subsection{To Be Done Today}
\index{To Be Done!2022-09-04}
\begin{itemize}
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\item change me
\end{itemize}
The cursor advances to change me under Last night.
I write some notes about what I did.
Then I hit tab to advance to the next change me to write notes about the morning.
I hit tab again to advance to the first item in my TODO list for the day.
When I reach the bottom of the list, I enter C-c C-j to enter the next \item properly aligned and with the cursor in the right position.
A call to a macro inside the yasnippet snippet called start inserts the correct date in the index key. I create an index key without lifting a finger. See, Life can be Good in Emacs!
See the end of this slideshow for the application of GhostText to LaTeX editing with Emacs. For Jupyter users, you can likewise use GhostText to edit code and markdown cells with your favorite editor. See slideshow about this exciting topic. See the corresponding video.
- LaTeX manuscript template
- Writing log template in LaTeX
- Slideshow template in LaTeX
- Annotated bibliography Template in LaTeX
- Diary for 2022 in LaTeX
- Diary for 2023 in LaTeX
- latex-emacs profile
- snippets for latex-mode in Emacs
- Quizzes about Emacs to improve recall of keybindings
- Slides from talk about GhostText, Data Science Workshop, July 2022
- Video link to talk about GhostText, Data Science Workshop, July 2022
- The writer's law
| Version | Changes | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Version 0.2 | Added badges, funding, and update table. | 2024 May 23 |
- NIH: R01 CA242845
- NIH: R01 AI088011
- NIH: P30 CA225520 (PI: R. Mannel)
- NIH: P20 GM103640 and P30 GM145423 (PI: A. West)