Stem Notes — Development skill for Claude Code

stem-notes

A Claude Code skill that turns STEM source material (lecture slides, textbook chapters, scanned problem sheets, images, PowerPoint/Word files) into LaTeX study documents: formula/definition sheets, fully worked problem solutions, and summary notes.

How it works

The user is driven through the whole process with multiple-choice questions (`AskUserQuestion`) — nothing is generated silently. The skill:

1. Inventories the given sources (PDF, PNG/JPG, PPTX/DOCX) and checks whether each PDF is text-based or scanned.
2. Checks for required tooling (poppler, soffice, tectonic/pdflatex) and asks before installing anything.
3. Asks intake questions: which outputs to generate, output location, visual style, and per-output questions (density, scope, depth, ordering, etc.).
4. Reads every source page/slide/image in full.
5. Solves and verifies every problem in scope, checking non-trivial numbers with a short Python script, and flags any discrepancy with a printed answer instead of silently matching it.
6. Writes ASCII-only .tex files from the templates in templates/.
7. Optionally compiles to PDF (tectonic or latexmk), fixing errors until it compiles cleanly.
8. Reports what was written, what was skipped, and any discrepancies found.

Layout

• SKILL.md — the workflow the skill follows, step by step.
• references/questions.md — the MCQ question bank used for intake.
• references/tooling.md — required tools, install commands/sizes, and the shell commands used to inspect/convert sources.
• references/style-guide.md — layout, labelling, and solution-format rules for each output type.
• templates/formula_sheet.tex — formula/definition sheet preamble.
• templates/solutions.tex — worked-solutions preamble.
• templates/summary_notes.tex — summary-notes preamble.

Output

By default, generated `.tex` files (and PDFs, if compiled) are written to a `latex/` subfolder next to the source files, unless the user choo