Easy way to record technical subjects with LibreOffice Math
Problem:
I regularly go to work in the subway, and I see young people, probably students, with MacBooks, tablets, iPhones and iPads. Well, that is, it is clear that they live in step with the time - twitter there, Facebook for sure, instagramm. Maybe they even probably watch lectures on Coursera . It is surprising that with all of this, students read the abstracts of handwritten lectures in a notebook - with abbreviations, tables, underlined definitions of terms, etc. And these handwritten notebooks cause cognitive dissonance in me - why can't I write lectures on a laptop in 2012?
After all, the decision has long been known - OpenOffice / LibreOffice.
If you are a humanist, then in general everything is simply unrealistic - in your lectures there are probably no formulas, no graphs, no drawings, nothing but text and tables. Sit at a lecture, listen to the teacher, type your text in some Word. The speed of printing for most people is higher than the speed of handwriting - it is a fact. Plus, such a feature as autocompletion significantly increases the speed of printing - if the word “innovation” has already been encountered in the text several times, then as soon as you start to write “inno”, OpenOffice / LibreOffice will offer to add it to the desired one. Pressed enter, entered the word.
If you are an engineer, and you are dealing with mathematical formulas, then the free OpenOffice.org or its current free GPL version of LibreOffice has long been invented for you. The chip of these packages is that there is an incredibly convenient editor of mathematical formulas, which, by the way, is very similar to TeX in its syntax. In MS Office, there is also an input tool for mathematical formulas, but I definitely would not call it convenient for myself - there you have to poke it with a mouse - this is banal for a long time.
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So how it works. Suppose we need to write the following mathematical formula:
If you write it in pen, on a piece of paper, it will take me 20 seconds.
In the editor of mathematical formulas built into LibreOffice, it will look like this:
and writing it takes me 15 seconds. In case a formula with a similar structure has already come across in the lectures, I will simply copy it, paste it in and edit the changes. It will take even less time.
In my opinion, the recording method is very clear and logical - it’s clear that int is an integral, from is the lower limit, to is the upper limit, lint is the integral over the surface. Well, of course, the markup language is interpretable, that is, the formula becomes visible immediately as you type. Introduced int - the integral sign appeared, introduced int from ... to ... - limits of integration appeared, etc.
Well, this is what a piece of lecture that I wrote at the institute in 2009 looks like. I chose this item because it was the most difficult to write - a bunch of formulas, a bunch of graphs:
Note: the moment “here I gave up” describes the entire audience, not just me, because by that time no one from the audience understood what was happening.
So, summing up some results, I will point out my advantages of conducting lectures in electronic form:
Minuses:
You can read more about the language for editing formulas here .
The LibreOffice package itself is available for download here.
Here is an example of one of the lectures in the .odt format that I wrote in 2009.
Unfortunately, I finished my full-time study a couple of years ago - then, in 2010, nobody lectured in this format, unfortunately, no one wrote. And this is despite the fact that it was one of the best technical universities in Moscow, preparing future communications engineers.
In general, it would be interesting to know how things are going with your institution? Corrections, comments, comments are welcome!
I regularly go to work in the subway, and I see young people, probably students, with MacBooks, tablets, iPhones and iPads. Well, that is, it is clear that they live in step with the time - twitter there, Facebook for sure, instagramm. Maybe they even probably watch lectures on Coursera . It is surprising that with all of this, students read the abstracts of handwritten lectures in a notebook - with abbreviations, tables, underlined definitions of terms, etc. And these handwritten notebooks cause cognitive dissonance in me - why can't I write lectures on a laptop in 2012?
After all, the decision has long been known - OpenOffice / LibreOffice.
If you are a humanist, then in general everything is simply unrealistic - in your lectures there are probably no formulas, no graphs, no drawings, nothing but text and tables. Sit at a lecture, listen to the teacher, type your text in some Word. The speed of printing for most people is higher than the speed of handwriting - it is a fact. Plus, such a feature as autocompletion significantly increases the speed of printing - if the word “innovation” has already been encountered in the text several times, then as soon as you start to write “inno”, OpenOffice / LibreOffice will offer to add it to the desired one. Pressed enter, entered the word.
If you are an engineer, and you are dealing with mathematical formulas, then the free OpenOffice.org or its current free GPL version of LibreOffice has long been invented for you. The chip of these packages is that there is an incredibly convenient editor of mathematical formulas, which, by the way, is very similar to TeX in its syntax. In MS Office, there is also an input tool for mathematical formulas, but I definitely would not call it convenient for myself - there you have to poke it with a mouse - this is banal for a long time.
')
So how it works. Suppose we need to write the following mathematical formula:
If you write it in pen, on a piece of paper, it will take me 20 seconds.
In the editor of mathematical formulas built into LibreOffice, it will look like this:
lint from vec H d vec l = int from S vec jd vec S + int from S {{partial vec D} over {partial t}} d vec S
and writing it takes me 15 seconds. In case a formula with a similar structure has already come across in the lectures, I will simply copy it, paste it in and edit the changes. It will take even less time.
In my opinion, the recording method is very clear and logical - it’s clear that int is an integral, from is the lower limit, to is the upper limit, lint is the integral over the surface. Well, of course, the markup language is interpretable, that is, the formula becomes visible immediately as you type. Introduced int - the integral sign appeared, introduced int from ... to ... - limits of integration appeared, etc.
Well, this is what a piece of lecture that I wrote at the institute in 2009 looks like. I chose this item because it was the most difficult to write - a bunch of formulas, a bunch of graphs:
Note: the moment “here I gave up” describes the entire audience, not just me, because by that time no one from the audience understood what was happening.
So, summing up some results, I will point out my advantages of conducting lectures in electronic form:
- All my lectures that I wrote are still kept in my dropbox. Where are my handwritten lectures, I do not remember.
- No need to deal with handwriting.
- I can calmly convert a lecture in pdf and send to my classmate. He also does not need to deal with my handwriting.
- Conveniently prepare cheat sheets. Nuff said.
- Well, my any - when the teacher, deducing another formula, realizes that ten minutes ago he made a mistake, apologizes, and starts methodically correcting three written formula boards, the entire audience exhales in righteous rage - they need to edit the handwritten text, turning the handwritten lecture into minced meat In my case, I just need to correct a few formulas. The external tidiness of the lecture does not naturally change.
- Everyone on the stream wants to be friends with you, because you have the most understandable lectures, hehe.
- One time, the terver teacher asked me to throw him a lecture. That was my glory hour, of course.
Minuses:
- everything that went beyond mathematics and primitive graphics caused fierce batthert in me. For example, drawing this did not cause any problems - I use third-party schema editors:
And now it was almost impossible to do this in the lecture mode:
- When dealing with older teachers in the exam, it was very difficult to demonstrate my lectures and explain to them what I really wrote them myself. Yes, remember, I was sitting there with you. Yes, on a laptop. Yes, this is such an editor.
You can read more about the language for editing formulas here .
The LibreOffice package itself is available for download here.
Here is an example of one of the lectures in the .odt format that I wrote in 2009.
Unfortunately, I finished my full-time study a couple of years ago - then, in 2010, nobody lectured in this format, unfortunately, no one wrote. And this is despite the fact that it was one of the best technical universities in Moscow, preparing future communications engineers.
In general, it would be interesting to know how things are going with your institution? Corrections, comments, comments are welcome!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/152116/
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