Creating a digital index for my paper notebooks

One of the few valid arguments against paper notebooks is that they are more difficult to search than digital notes. Fine, I’ll concede that one. But I’m working on a patch.

Rather than trying to digitize/OCR everything, I’ve decided that a simple index of topics should be sufficient. While rummaging around for ways to do this, I found Soren Bjornstad’s mindex. Mindex is a small Python script that takes some input and generates a concise LaTeX-then-PDF index based on a simple text (.mindex) file.

Here’s a section of the .mindex file for my current notebook:

Books       32
Charlie     37-41
COVID-19    23,32,39
Creativity  43
Crypto      35
Devices     34
Fusionary   21, 26
Health      26,41
Investing   26
Journaling  21,37

It’s a tab-delimited file with Topic->Pages->Sort Key. The third column, Sort Key, allows for tweaking of where each entry ends up in the final index. I’ve not needed to use that yet, though.

I wanted a few minor formatting changes so I forked Soren’s repo to https://github.com/jackbaty/mindex and tweaked it a little. Here’s the current output:

I think it looks nice. LaTeX is awesome. I’m planning to update the index once a month or so. I just did it for May and it only took about 10 minutes. That’s not too high a price to pay for the ability to find things more quickly. Once a notebook is complete I may print a copy and insert it right into that notebook.

I’m still thinking about how to best manage this, but it’s a nice start.