I approach this in the same pattern. There are some technological tricks that have recently made it much easier, though.
In addition to Arxiv and preprints I can find online, there's Google Scholar and Amazon Previews (I'm still missing many journal articles, especially in engineering, due to a lack of university access, luckily they're often compiled in journals on Amazon). By flipping through Amazon's book previews using the search feature, I can read an arbitrary number of pages in any given book, and the world's library is at my lap. I can then 'photocopy' the relevant/interesting sections using ctrl-shift-command-4 on my Mac, and paste them into my Evernote. In this way I can locate and collate a large number of papers and texts, and organize them along the way without even dipping into LaTeX. After that, I can past those copies into Mathematica, which has a very workable equation typesetter, with the additional advantage of the equations being computable.
Lately I make a lot of use of Evernote, however, which I can pretty much paste anything into, and I can 'photocopy' any part of a text on the computer by using ctrl-shift-command-4 on my Mac.
In addition to Arxiv and preprints I can find online, there's Google Scholar and Amazon Previews (I'm still missing many journal articles, especially in engineering, due to a lack of university access, luckily they're often compiled in journals on Amazon). By flipping through Amazon's book previews using the search feature, I can read an arbitrary number of pages in any given book, and the world's library is at my lap. I can then 'photocopy' the relevant/interesting sections using ctrl-shift-command-4 on my Mac, and paste them into my Evernote. In this way I can locate and collate a large number of papers and texts, and organize them along the way without even dipping into LaTeX. After that, I can past those copies into Mathematica, which has a very workable equation typesetter, with the additional advantage of the equations being computable.
Lately I make a lot of use of Evernote, however, which I can pretty much paste anything into, and I can 'photocopy' any part of a text on the computer by using ctrl-shift-command-4 on my Mac.