As the title said.
For the use case of reading PDF’s of physics/math textbooks. And papers too.
Books are heavy, takes a lot of space, and not great for the environment.
Obviously when studying for physics/math courses, the best thing to do is doing more problems.
But I was wondering if anyone was able to successfully use MarginNote to replace reading physical books/printed research papers?
I had some success with the previous version but the new one (MarginNote 3) removed LaTeX/math text support, so it no longer is really viable for me as someone who works with math frequently.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t have LaTeX support anymore.
TLDR: IMO, even an 12.9 inch ipad can’t replace math/physics textbooks + notes.
Other obvious problems if you want to replace physical math/physics textbooks: (also applies to other note-taking and similar apps)
You can’t extract texts with math symbols properly. As shown here MarginNote 3 E-reader Redefine your Study - YouTube
You basically need to cut and paste snippets as images.
But this is true for any apps. The technology is just not there yet. Or more likely, the money/demand is just not there.
In landscape mode, even on ipad 12.9, textbooks are too small. I’m talking about the case where PDF gets one half of the screen, and the notes has the other half. Springers obviously are better here, since their pages are small. But some books, like AMS ones or the ones published by Cambridge/Oxford has much larger pages with a lot of white space. Perl script “pdfcrop” can crop the white margins. But I don’t like the result.
You can obviously zoom the PDF’s, but I originally got a large ipad so I don’t need to zoom things.
You can also connect the ipad to a larger monitor, but in that case just get a Wacom tablet.
Again, true for any similar apps. I don’t know what I expected. Obviously an A4 notebook, loose papers, a textbook, and a monitor would have more space than a single ipad. I feel really constrained when I try to replace everything with an ipad.
PDF’s annotation produce a huge file. True for any app. But portrait mode makes sense here. So the PDF is in normal size.
If you like to annotate papers. I don’t. I take notes when I read papers instead of highlighting text or scribbling on the margins.
Free icloud storage is really really small. Just 5 GB. Not enough to sync all notes and annotated PDF. Just a few notes on Notability and Goodnotes is already a few hundred MB’s.
It hurts my eyes. Staring on the ipad all the time to read and write notes really strain my eyes. I was not able to find something like Eyeleo on ipad.
In my opinion, an ipad can replace a notebook. A very expensive replacement. And for that, you don’t need 12.9 pro one. Hell, I don’t think you need an apple pencil. I write just fine with my fingers and zoom on those note-taking apps. I’d guess those cheap stylus would write great too. Apple pencil is great though without zoom.
Obviously it can be an ereader too. A 12.9 ipad is nice for textbooks and papers. But it’s difficult for an ipad to replace textbooks and notebooks at the same time. Just my opinion, obviously people have used ipad successfully for that purpose.
It seems there is LaTeX support as described here: Math Text - #5 by Edward_Support-Team
I missed that thread.