I also strongly prefer paper journals. For those of you in the US, checkout Vela [1], a little company in Michigan that makes outstanding journals. The paper is excellent quality for fountain pens and they have many choices for page setup - ruled, grid, dot grid, etc. A little pricy though.
My wallet does not like you right now. Good quality hardback journals for 'cheap' (Office Depot prices), and made by a small US-Based company? Sign me up.
EDIT: Does anyone else know of any companies like this for office supplies? Notebooks, pens, inks etc.? I support Noodler's Ink since they are entirely US-based, but even they have some of their pens made in India etc.
> One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.
Counterpoint: Yes they can.
There’s this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It’s like the people who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it’s not).
For some people the end result of digital notes is vastly superior to anything they can scribble in a notebook.
Except, vinyl fundamentally solves the same problem as another medium of storing audio.
Paper offers a different level of expression. The comparison is thus not equivalent.
Usually when you offer a counter point you don’t just disagree, but provide some basis or example to show the statement or proposition in question is false.
Fetishising notebooks aside, parent mentioned expressiveness. Clearly everything that can be _expressed_ in Markdown can be expressed on paper, but it’s not clear that the opposite is true.
As far as end results go, obviously My Life And What I Learned Along The Way.pdf is obviously going to win out over a pile of scribbles.
Regarding my original point, it’s what you use to get to the finished product that counts, and I maintain that hacking markdown is inferior to freeform pen and paper thinking.
The difference is there is literature and research to support paper note taking as superior to digital in terms of comprehension and creative thought. If you've indexed your notebooks, it isn't hard to go back find relevant info years later.
I use mermaid.js for graphs and charts in markdown. It takes a long time, related to pen and paper, so I don’t use it for note taking. But it’s really nice for procedural documentation.
I like dotted grid as well. However I like Pilot Juice Up 03 gel tip .3mm. They are very precise, write in many conditions, and I’ve never had one run out of ink.
If you like fine points Uniball's Signo RT1 write very well with 0.28mm tips. Ink capacity is not their strong point though. Pretty sure I was going through several a semester.
I found that the Zebras, while certainly attractive and satisfying in the hand, write like crap (rough feel, inconsistent ink flow). My favorite pen these days is the Pilot V5 RT, but I wish I could throw the refill for it in a body more like the Zebra 401.
I used the zebras for many years but like the smaller point on the JuiceUps and the gel seems to work better than ball point. I miss the metal body, but I would fiddle with the clip and eventually break them off.
A digital system like GoodNotes on an iPad is a pretty good hybrid system. I can type, write by hand, sketch, paste in code and graphics, embed hyperlinks, etc...
It has built in OCR so a search will find my handwritten notes as well.
One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.
Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the journal page where the magic actually happened.
(It’s too bad that magic usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)