I’m a week into my senior year, and I’ve gotten sick of using OneNote for note taking. As a linux user, I’m pretty much limited to the web interface or WINE, and I’d really prefer neither. I’ve also had plenty of issues with notes not syncing / getting lost in the cloud, which is more than enough of a reason to switch to something else.

Last semester I tried taking notes in markdown, then translating them into HTML using hugo or grip.

I had one issue with markdown though, and that’s how it handles whitespace. The way it ignores leading whitespace and is slow to add newlines is great when I am writing blog posts, but when I take notes I use spacing to group information. My notes are full of things like:

Regular Expressions
	They are cool
	There is this thing called the Kleene Star
		L("it*") = {i, it, itt, ...}
		r** = r*
	Epsilon is a valid regular expression
		2 * 2 = 4 * 1

which renders like this in markdown:

Regular Expressions They are cool There is this thing called the Kleene Star L(“it*“) = {i, it, itt, …} r** = r* Epsilon is a valid regular expression 2 * 2 = 4 * 1

which is no good. I could just use plain text, but when I’m reading my notes, I’d like for things like \epsilon to render as an epsilon. So, ultimately I decided to throw together my own little markup language and a python script to convert it to HTML. It was done in under an hour, and is pretty lazy (to make whitespace nice it just sticks a <pre> at the start…), but it does what I need it to.

This input:

Test Header
==========
Part 1
------
This text is normal
	And white space is safe from distress
	*and you can make text bold*
	_or underline it_
	And you can `toggle *bold* for when you need it`
	You can also escape stars\*
	But a lone backslash doesn't need escaping \
	Nor does a double backslash \\
	And you can use a few math symbols
	r = `"a*"`
		\epsilon \isin L(r)
		"a" \isin L(r)
		\pi is a number

will produce this output:

Test Header
Part 1
This text is normal
    And white space is safe from distress
    and you can make text bold
    or underline it
    And you can toggle *bold* for when you need it
    You can also escape stars*
    But a lone backslash doesn't need escaping \
    Nor does a double backslash \\
    And you can use a few math symbols
    r = "a*"
        ε ϵ L(r)
        "a" ϵ L(r)
        π is a number

which is good enough for me. The source is available in my blogwork repo.