Notes on paper

2024-02-25 14:14:36

Introduction
Habits
Scanning
Some pages

Introduction

Over the previous few weeks, I’ve been scanning my notes and homework from college utilizing the great skilled scanners at my office. These notes have been sitting in my closet for a number of years as a result of I do not need to maintain them, however did not need to throw them out till scanning them, and I’ve by no means had entry to a scanner that might do all these pages.

This has prompted me to mirror on among the habits and selections that I observe in my handwritten notes. I understand there are whole on-line cultures of journaling and notetaking and notebook-buying, and I am not right here to compete with them. That is simply what I do.

Habits

At all times put a date on each web page, together with pages which might be given to you. For a number of pages in sooner or later, it helps so as to add a web page quantity.

At all times use free leaf paper, by no means certain notebooks.

You’ll be able to hand a single sheet to somebody.
You’ll be able to rewrite a sheet later and put it again in the identical order, as an alternative of protecting or tearing out the unhealthy copy.
Simpler to cross reference a earlier day with out flipping forwards and backwards.
Simpler to combine with different materials: pages you obtain, homework you submit and get again.
Simpler to buy the identical or equal paper over the course of years, reasonably than growing an eclectic assortment of various notebooks or, worse, a model dependency.
Simpler to scan.

At all times use full-size paper (US Letter or A4 relying in your area) in order that your notes stack effectively with printed materials. Lots of lined/punched pocket book paper is smaller than printer paper.

Favor to jot down in black ink reasonably than coloured ink or pencil. Use high quality pens that produce deep black strains, not low cost pens that produce off-black or hole strains.

Simpler to scan in 1-bit format.
I like black, what can I say.

At all times write on a single aspect of the paper, by no means the bottom, until compelled to take action. The greenback price of the paper is lower than the inconvenience price of double sided materials.

Resist the urge to cram every little thing onto one web page. The telltale swap from huge handwriting to “I am working out of area” small handwriting on the backside of the web page is shameful. Two pages with wholesome margins and spacing is best than one web page of cramming.

Think about using graph paper, even for non-mathematics, non-engineering notes. Favor faint gridlines. You’ll be able to:

Think about using plain, clean printer paper. At work, I’m at the moment utilizing clean printer paper for notetaking, and my “manuscript” is as much as about 140 sheets. I do not suppose I’d suggest this for structured college lectures, however it’s good for unstructured conferences.

Because of writing this text, I’ve determined to attempt going again to graph paper for my work notes. This time, as an alternative of utilizing store-bought graph paper, I am simply printing my very own. I created an svg file with a half-inch margin and a whisper-faint quarter-inch grid. That is figuring out nice and I want I had accomplished it sooner.

Sample, margin, lightness, and paper inventory tailor-made precisely to your preferences.
Making an attempt new patterns is totally free — no dedication to a reamful of 1 sample.
No dependence on model or producer. So long as yow will discover clean paper that fits you, you can also make your graph paper.
Price per sheet nonetheless extraordinarily low when utilizing laser printers.
Very constant throughout pages — low cost store-bought graph paper typically has inconsistent grid offset from web page to web page.
Lightness of gridlines should be tuned per-printer by experimentation.
The paper might change into barely curled or wavy as a result of warmth and rollers — the paper will want time and/or weight to flatten again out.

Contemplate re-writing your notes after your class/assembly, in an effort to:

Reorganize the data in a brand new order that you can not have foreseen when taking it down.
Use slower, extra cautious handwriting.
Substitute abbreviations with full phrases and phrases.
Remove the scratched-out errors and maintain solely the nice components.

I’ve by no means used a digital pill for notetaking, and I can’t make the enchantment to custom that paper is all the time higher. I can think about it brings some benefits:

Need not scan it.
On the spot OCR makes it searchable (assuming software program help) (requires non-awful handwriting).
Can combine typing for good legibility with drawing for visible aids.
Simpler to combine photographs taken on the spot.
Infinite paper and ink.
Undo button, layers, drag to rearrange.

Benefits of paper:

Low cost.
Simpler to put out a number of sheets and evaluate / cross-reference pages in any order — not restricted to actual property of 1 display screen and scrolling / tab-switching.
You’ll be able to hand somebody a single sheet to allow them to learn it whilst you work on different sheets — you are not handing them your whole system.
Simpler to combine with materials you obtain.
Open-note exams will most likely solely permit paper for fairly a while but.

Scanning

I scanned every little thing at 600 PPI in 1-bit TIFF. The scanners at work do not appear to help lossless full colour, and I would reasonably have the aliasing and dithering artifacts of lossless 1-bit than the jpeggy, blocky artifacts of lossy colour. That is an aesthetic desire and I feel dithering appears to be like cool anyway.

I wrote imagesequence_to_images.py to show the scanner’s multi-page TIF file into separate PNGs.

I exploit brename.py to rename every little thing.

When coping with double-sided materials and a single-sided scanner, I scanned the stack twice for the fronts and backs. Then, I did one thing like this:

md fronts && transfer fronts*.png fronts
md backs && transfer backs*.png backs

cd fronts

# Fronts will get even index numbers, beginning from zero.
brename "f'{(index*2):03d}.png'"

cd ..backs

# Massive quantity minus index to reverse the file order.
brename "f'{(999-index):03d}.png'"

# Backs will get odd index numbers, beginning from one.
brename "f'{(index*2)+1:03d}.png'"

cd ..
transfer fronts* . && rmdir fronts
transfer backs* . && rmdir backs

# ...
# Spend a few minutes manually deleting the clean backsides.
# ...

# Reindex all the information so we can fake the clean backsides did not exist.
# Renaming will fail if the goal filename already exists, so briefly
# bump up to extra digits, then again down.
brename "f'{index1:04d}.png'"
brename "f'{index1:03d}.png'"

Some pages

Listed below are some pages that I believed had been visually fascinating. These should not good demonstrations of the habits above, and that is the purpose — over time I’ve realized issues I ought to have been doing all alongside.

I discover there’s one thing actually participating about with the ability to zoom in and pan round and pixel peep at these millimeter-sized options that, on the time of their making, solely occupied a number of tenths of a second of consideration. The small writ massive, because it had been.

I’m together with extra pages right here than most anyone will care to look via, however I could not choose any extra to eradicate. I feel they’re type of cool.