Unicoding with Typinator and LaTeXing notes

Thanks to Aaron F. about telling me about Typinator (which is a nice text expander for Mac), which allows me to write more readable LaTeX by using Unicode (think μ(θ) vs. \mu(\theta)), which has been helpful.

It took a little getting used to, and a bit awkward when I made my keystrokes with colons instead of \ for LaTeX, so :mu for μ.  It’s helpful to see these symbols in latex, but it’s invaluable when trying to annotate pdf notes from professors.  One of my goals this year was to go almost completely digital with respect to notes.  I have done a lot of it, and find sometimes it’s faster (think of copying and pasting whole equations when people are writing on a board), but has caused a lot of hand cramps.

Also – (if they show up on your system), Unicode can be easily done in blogging (although I may recommend mathjax or some other latex-embedding javascript system if you’re getting math heavy), and can be used on Twitter:

RT @statfact with “hats”: if 𝜃̂ is the MLE of θ, f(𝜃̂) is mle of f(θ) for any function f. But which unicode can you rely on? @johndcook

— John Muschelli (@StrictlyStat) April 16, 2013

Disclaimer: there are other text expanders out there (AutoHotKey for Windows) and Typinator is pay for, otherwise it has pop-ups somewhat infrequently when you use a set number of characters.