How to Structure Textbook Notes

Questions & Help
1

I am currently working on transitioning from Obsidian to Logseq, and I was wondering what the best way to structure notes on a textbook would be. The format of most textbooks is a simple hierarchy of Book > Unit > Chapter. In Obsidian I can simply use folders to represent this heirarchy; however Logseq doesn’t seem to support this as well.

I believe that the pragmatic way would be to use namespaces to achieve this hierarchy, but there are two main problems:

  1. Names of units and chapters are many times extremely long and unwieldy
    • E.X. I don’t really want to have to name something Campbell/06. The Evolutionary History of Biological Diversity/01. Phylogeny and the Tree of Life every time I want to make a note on a new chapter, especially considering there is no easy way to make a child page without retyping the entire path.
    • Instead I opted to simply do Campbell/u01/ch01 and put the title in a title property, but this comes with its own host of problems, as it is then impossible to tell what links are pointing at until you preview the page
  2. There is no way to view this hierarchy of Units and Chapters in an ordered form without using the first naming convention above. This is because I want to be able to see an ordered list of the titles of all of the Units and Chapters in a tree on the main page for easy access.

What would be the best way to achieve this in LogSeq? Is there some kind of query I could use to create a list of Units and Chapters with their respective titles?

This is kind of a deal-breaker for me as nearly half of the notes I have are on various textbooks, and I dont really want to have to make a table of contents manually for each of them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

Welcome.

  • Your primary issue is that you don’t start clean, but with plenty of pre-existing notes.
    • Your initial approach should be dictated by the format of those notes.
      • Unless you have the time to change that format.
  • There is no best way.
  • There are:
    • trade-offs
    • co-existence of multiple ways
  • Ideally, should utilize all of the options that you mentioned.
  • Try to keep your options open and see in practice what each option is best at, e.g.:
    • Long titles
      • Best for reading.
      • Bad for writing.
    • Short names
      • Best for writing.
      • Bad for reading.
    • Namespaces
      • Best for legacy folders.
      • Ideal for disambiguation.
      • Horrible for everything else.
    • Properties
      • Best for meta-data.
      • They enable advanced things with the following points.
    • Queries
      • A special single big list doesn’t work well.
      • Multiple smaller dynamic lists work better.
    • Macros
      • They provide the most power.
      • They need some coding, but afterwards they can save the most time.
      • e.g. you could:
        • type {{camp 6-1
          • get for free the full Campbell/06. The Evolutionary History of Biological Diversity/01. Phylogeny and the Tree of Life
        • type {{pagetree from, parent
          • get for free a parent-based tree
  • You are not expected to begin using everything at once.
    • But people who exclude options are missing out.
1 Like
3

I’m new to Logseq and PKM’s in general but I did learn a few things.

Long names of unit chapter.
You can use aliases instead of the full namespace

For the heiarchy I came across a plugin that let’s you create a heirachy of your favorites.
Just go to plugins and search for “Favorite Tree”

Hope this helps.