Draft to Document: Why I Made My Notes Look Like LaTeX Papers

On Reitz LaTeX, an Obsidian theme where you write like iA Writer and read like a LaTeX paper. Your notes are drafts while you write them. When you read them back, they should look like they matter. That sentence is the whole reason I built Reitz LaTeX, a theme for Obsidian. It's small and opinionated. I want to explain the thinking behind it, because the thinking is really what it's about. The medium is the message McLuhan was right. How a thing looks isn't decoration on top of the content. It changes what the content is. The same paragraph reads as a scribble in one typeface and as an argument in another. Set your thinking like a scratchpad and you'll treat it like one. Set it like a paper and you'll start writing papers. (This is the same bet as the rest of the work. The interface is not a costume you put on afterward. It is the room the thinking happens in.) So the theme takes a deliberate position: aesthetics come first. The look is the point, not a finish applied at the end. I…

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