Why? Just Why?
I get that, it's a valid question. The answer is simple, in my books... I wanted some way to take notes that (a) looks nice, (b) is easy to incorporate images and code, and (c) isn't obnoxious. I think I achieved two of those three goals.
Yep, LaTeX is obnoxious. There's no getting away from it. What even is a \textbf{}, and why can't I just use & in a sentence without escaping it - this isn't C. But under that surface-level obnoxiousness is an elegant document typesetting system which simply works. Never did I have the experience of shifting a figure 1mm to the left and having seven new pages appear, that's just an issue with Word (or maybe it's because you can't easily move figures 1mm to the left in LaTeX).
There were certainly times where I wished I could just insert the image and walk away, but forcing myself to use TikZ or making a vector image did make my notes look really nice; and I'm really proud of that.
So, yeah. I did it because it looks nice and let me add tables, pictures and snippets of code or algorithms without fighting with MS Word. But also because they're hugely obnoxious and that's what make me smile :D
Evolution Through The Years
As you could most likely expect, my use of LaTeX has changed quite a lot throughout the four years of my degree. In part this is due to me wanting to push myself to make more aesthetic notes, but there were a few more technical changes that made a world of difference.
Level 4
Many moons ago in 2022, I was a fresh-faced fresher. New to university, new to electronic note-taking and still pretty new to LaTeX. Montserrat was all the rage (hindsight is a wonderful thing). There were cool coloured boxes which got used for about 10 minutes for definitions, key points, questions, examples and links. Diagrams came in a mix of TikZ, handmade in Google Drawing and screenshots "borrowed" from slides. Tables needn't be discussed here, there were some and they were a sight to behold.
Lots of my time at Level 4 was spent trying to figure out what needed to be noted down and how to note it down effectively. Writing in prose suited me more than bullet points; and generally capturing everything and anything worked quite well.
Level four also marked the year of including every code snippet, output and lots of tutorial worksheets. Honestly? I never reviewed these in revision.
This worked, don't get me wrong, but reflecting as I've just finished writing a 150 page dissertation in LaTeX - damn I was daft back then. The biggest difference has to be experience, before starting writing these notes I'd used LaTeX a bit for some A-Level documents, and a few documents which will never see the public light of day. But really? My university notes were my first adventure into writing and simultaneously typesetting long, complex documents.
In May 2026 while preparing this website (revision, what's that?), I went back through all my Level 4 notes and converted them into a slightly more homogenous format with the rest of the set. Purists - go pound sand, these are my notes and they've been irritating me for 3 years so forgive me for editing them slightly. The originals can still be found in the GitHub repository.
Level 5
Ah, September 2023, what a nice time that was. I'd moved into a new flat, actually managed to setup a vaguely comfortable desk and spent the summer frolicking in a field. Having made some revision sheets for Level 4 final exams, I'd grown out of Montserrat and settled for the default Computer Modern font. Coloured boxes had been banished to the high-hills and overall some cleanup effort was made to the preamble. Images and diagrams were now just a combination of Google Draw creations or generated using TikZ, and tables finally looked more aesthetic (who knew row height was so important?!?). Code snippets also had a major clean up, moving from syntax highlighted snippets to simply using a Verbatim block unified the look of my notes. A module around Discrete Mathematics gave a good first adventure into mathematical typesetting.
I had my note taking style down. After Level 4 and some time reflecting on the aesthetic components, it did sort of work using no coloured boxes and making every effort to make diagrams in TikZ. They certainly looked cleaner, although that might have something to do with the nicer font...
Things were missing though. Not having clear example environments often lead to strange use of subheadings in a slightly incoherent and un-semantic way. Diagrams also were strange, with some modules using TikZ and some using Google Draw. While this was functionally acceptable, the difference between Google Draw style diagrams and TikZ diagrams is jarring, especially with fonts and colours.
Level 6
After a year in the mountains, I was back down south for my final year of study. With it being a new year, it was time for a new preamble for notes and some tweaks to the template.
The biggest tweak to the template, after much pain in prior years was to correctly configure \usepackage[skip=0.7em]{parskip}. Somehow after using LaTeX for 4 years I still hadn't come to the realisation that you don't have to put \\ between every paragraph. Yeah, I was massively silly, but there we go. This is what happens when a 16 year old me attempts to self-learn something, we don't need to talk about the fact I did believe that was the light and truth for 4 years.
Coloured boxes were back in fashion, coming in four flavours: external link, todo, example and definition. These were heavily inspired by boxes shared by blxkex on GitHub. Figures all were made in TikZ, except for a few made in Inkscape and included as PDFs where TikZ actually caused pain, tables were beautified to use a coloured header row, and colours updated to use my brand kit. Other than that, the formatting basically stayed the same as the Level 5 notes.
In the true spirit of procrastinating my dissertation, I toyed with the idea of having a 'back page' on the notes so when printed - they would be an even number of pages and the back page would have more of a blurb on them about what and why they are. This is one of those ideas I wish I had done in my first year, as that would be a really nice addition. Similarly, I would have liked to add a 'course announcement' box to the template, giving space for course related announcements to be added in somewhere structured rather than before the body of the notes start, sometimes in italics and sometimes not.
Capturing content was a hybrid of the Level 4 anything, everything, and the partridge in the pear tree approach, and the Level 5 selective approach. This was reflective of having seminars introduced to my schedule where new content was divulged, not just working through a worksheet in a tutorial. This really worked for me, and having all the notes for a single subject in a single PDF make it super easy to read through and absorb content by osmosis during revision.
Level 6 notes are the notes I'm most proud of. They capture the content the best, have the best vibe and all around capture my LaTeX journey at University into a nice document. Possibly I feel this way in part as they got me through some flipping difficult modules and through the other side with banging grades, but also because they capture the journey; they show the pain, the suffering and the success when a concept was understood.
How Did I Start With This Madness?
Bear in mind this is being written in 2026, and a lot of what I'm talking about here happened in 2022, I've done my best to cite resources where I can find them (taking a trip down my Reddit saved posts is a blast from the past, I can say that much for sure).
Taking notes in LaTeX is not a new concept, nor is trying to make them pretty and cutesy. Inspiration for this project in the first place very much came from r/LaTeX and the wonderful typesetters on there making some genuinely beautiful looking documents.
After some research, read doom scrolling, a post on r/LaTeX caught my eye. While the links in the post now don't work, the images in the post give a flavour of what I saw many moons ago. The user posted a comment with references to other resources; it was here I discovered Gilles Castel.
Castel has an incredible workflow (available on their website) for taking complex yet aesthetic mathematics notes in real time. This workflow terrified me, and still does, but the essence of what they achieve is awe inspiring - being able to take that level of notes live in a lecture while listening and deciphering what the lecturer is talking about.
I think that's it - a Reddit post and seeing someone else having achieved the same thing. I'm sure there was lots of Googling and debating if this is effective, or downright stupid, involved too. But I can't find any other significant resources which I recall inspiring me to take on this project.
Props should go all at r/LaTeX who posted their aesthetic notes and made me drool, dreaming that one day mine might be that aesthetic. Also to those who post asking about how to make pretty boxes, circuit diagrams, and code listings; or just talking about their workflows and being nerdy about them.
Show Us The Notes!!
All 250,000 words of these notes are available open source in my uni-notes GitHub repository or can be accessed through the full index page on this website.
Some highlights of notes I'm especially proud of below: