Diary for 2024 in LaTeX

What is this?

This repo contains a template book with 366 blank tex files, one for each day of this leap year. These tex files are collated and rendered into a PDF with LaTeX compilers. It is set up for 2024. 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 with conservative margins to save paper.

Configuration on Overleaf

The project was compiled into a PDF with the following settings on Dec. 6, 2023.

Under Menu in the upper left, select the following:

Compiler: LuaLaTeX
Tex Live version: 2023
Main document: main.tex

What is this good for?

This can be used for the following purposes:

diary
laboratory notebook
log book
managing todo lists and plans
provide material for an autobiography or 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 in 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 it is used as a Captian's log of one's own Enterprise. For example, lists of accomplishments can be stored in the Appendices.

Prior Experience

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.

Limitations

Writing in LaTeX has some limitations:

The document is limited by computer RAM to one year.
The document is limited by RAM in terms of the number of lists and indices that can be generated at a time.
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.

Compiling

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 is run in the top level of the folder 2024diary, 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.

Role of the 0AAAContents.tex file.

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.

Configuration

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 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 that 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 your new appendices, like your annual plan, to the Appendix as a text file.

Daily use

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 start writing 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.

On-line editor

I recommend using the online editor Overleaf for the smoothest operation. I have been editing this diary document on Overleaf for seven 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, and so on.

Local general editors

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 tex file and open PDF with cmd-R)
Sublime Text
VS Code
Vim
NeoVim
Emacs

TextMate for the Mac does not get enough love these days. It starts lightning fast. It is still the editor that I most frequently to make minor edits of all flavors of plain text files, although I am migrating to Emacs. It is my go-to editor for minor edits of \LaTeX files. For more extensive editing sessions. I prefer to use Emacs.

Thanks to elisp and a dedicated developer community, Emacs is the most configurable editor. I view Vim as the penultimate editor and Emacs as the ultimate one. That is, Vim is a good stepping stone to Emacs. Vim is great but there is more to my needs than modal editing. I used evil-mode and Vim key binding in Emacs for a year, but then I switched to the Emacs keybindings and have not looked back. They look intimidating until you understand their logic. There is no editor more advanced this Emacs.

Local specialized editors

When I was starting to learn how to use LaTeX in 2012, I used one of the specialized text editors. I actually explored three of them.

About a half dozen years ago, I figured out that I could edit LaTeX files in more generalized editors. Perhaps my use of luck Tech is pedestrian enough for the general editors to be good enough. I am not that advanced of a user; for example, I am not writing my own macros. I wound up deleting these specialized editors to force myself to become more familiar with the generalized editors.

Recently, I installed and played with the editor texmaker. It is a very comprehensive and powerful editor for \LaTeX. It is a fine backup for working locally when a connection to the internet is not available. There are some wonderful and very extensive tutorial videos about how to use this editor on YouTube. I just have not made the time to master this tool because I have not had a pressing need for it.

Emacs

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 you 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.

Best of both worlds: use local editor to edit today's entry on Overleaf

The Google Chrome extension GhostText supports the use of 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 made some notes about what I did. Then I hit the tab to advance to the next change me to make notes about the morning. I hit the 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.

Speech-to-text may triple your productivity

I have been using the Google Chrome plugin Voice In Plus since mid-August 2023 to dictate much of my daily writing because I am a slow typist. It works in any text area in any browser window. I paid $38/yr to access the ability to add custom commands, which has significantly reduced the word error rate. My customized voice commands are found in this section.

This section of the landing page includes links to several of my talks on this subject. This switch in workflow has tripled my monthly word count. I am still exploring what is sustainable and reasonable. I plan to move to an open-source language model as soon as possible.

Related projects of possible interest

Update history

Version	Changes	Date
Version 0.2	Added funding and update table. Extensive edits of the README.md.	2024 May 5

Funding

NIH: R01 CA242845, R01 AI088011
NIH: P30 CA225520 (PI: R. Mannel); P20GM103640 and P30GM145423 (PI: A. West)

MooersLab / diary2024inLaTeX