In the spirit of learning and advancement and doing ridiculously labor intensive things for stupid reasons, I am attempting to type and alphabetize my Pre-Calculus and Calculus notes."Why?" you may ask. "That sounds ridiculously labor intensive". Well, I'll tell you. My notes are confusing and vague, and lack comprehensible explanations. Instead of the amalgamation of worksheets and tables and notebooks, I want a single compendium of mathematical wonder.
I can see it now: a beautiful shining binder filled with all sorts of useful information with clear definitions and step-by-step guides to solving problems. I could look up anything, and BAM! There it is, complete with helpful notes and and hints. Eventually, through use, the easily accessible information would make its way into my brain. I would be well on my way to understanding the Integrated Theory of Calculus, or Calculus Transcendence, or "Getting It". Whatever you call it when you understand how everything fits together and creates a seamless, unified whole of pretty numbers that make sense.
It's a beautiful vision.
Then I sit down at the computer, determined and ready to type my thick, paper-filled notebook, and I realize that Google Docs has an inequality symbol...buried in "Insert Special Character", through several series of pull-down menus and scrolling through pages. Same with superscript. Same with union and infinity and integral symbols.
Okay, okay, I think. This will only take a little longer than I thought. You know what, there's a lot of stupid PreCalc stuff in here that I know well. I'll leave the simple stuff out. I'll just do things that I'll need, like asymptotes, and derivatives, and dividing polynomials through long division.
And then I realize it takes ten minute to type out one problem because I have to go through all of the menus to find the squared symbol. These are math notes. There are lots of equations.
I'm going to be frank. I'm a bit discouraged, and I'm not sure what to do. I'd love to have beautiful, pretty notes where everything is easy to find and easy to understand. It would be a lot less daunting than hunting through my notebook, not to mention less time-consuming. I just don't know how I can do this.
Yet another shining idea of mine blatantly crushed by inconvenience/time/laziness/inability to program computers....
Sounds like a very worthy effort. You need to create your own shortcuts for these things, like Excel does. >= and <= make perfectly good inequalities. Int could me integral ... I bet someone has already figured this out... you could always Find and Replace to add prettiness later. Good work. - Dave
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