My PreTeXt Course

This README was generated by running pretext new course. You should feel free to edit this to describe your project. Thanks to Mitch Keller for his contributions to this template.

Instructions

Build the entire course with:

pretext build --deploys

and then view it with

pretext deploy --stage-only
pretext view -d

If you want to build just a single activity, say the "Magic Beans" activity, run:

pretext build  pdf -i ./source/activities/magic-beans.ptx

This will create a pdf inside the output/pdfs directory.

Another thing to try:

pretext build scorm -i ./source/activities/magic-beans.ptx

How this is done

Look at the source files, in particular source/acitivies.ptx and source/activities/magic-beans.ptx to see how the activities are included in the main document and can also build on their own.

The use of xpointer="/1/1/1" is a little mysterious; we could have also used xpoint="Activity-magic-beans" to refer to the activity by its xml:id, although this would require us changing that for each included activity.

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Below you will find some advice for working with PreTeXt, including help with using the PreTeXt Codespace online editor through GitHub if you don't want to install the required software on your own computer.

Learning PreTeXt

See the PreTeXt documentation for links to a variety of resources.

We also recommend browsing through the annotated sample article and annotated sample book if you want to find examples and see the PreTeXt source for those examples quickly.

Using GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces are a way to set up your whole authoring system entirely in your browser. In case you are not already reading this inside a codespace, you can create one specifically designed for authoring in PreTeXt by using this template.

Important: how to save your files

The most important thing to remember when authoring in a codespace is that you are making all your edits on a virtual machine off in some remote server farm. This means there is an extra step to save your files. You can save files in the editor (in your browser), but this just saves them to that virtual machine. To make sure you can access these files, even if the virtual machine goes away, you need to sync them to github.com. This is done by committing your changes and then pushing those commits (or "syncing" them). You might see a warning when you restart your codespace that you have "uncommitted changes" -- make sure you commit them when you are done working.

Troubleshooting: Latex-images and pdfs

We have tried to keep the codespace small (so it starts up quickly and doesn't eat through your monthly storage allotment), so we do not include a full TeXLive distribution. We have tried to include most packages and fonts you are likely to need to generate images using <latex-image> elements, and to generate PDF print output. However, if you run into a situation where the LaTeX gives errors about packages missing (like it cannot find a mypackage.sty file), here is what you should do.

1. To quickly resolve the issue yourself, open a terminal (Ctrl+Shift+` ) and use the TeXLive Package Manager to install the missing package.
   a. If you know that the package is called mypackage then enter the following two lines:

   tlmgr install mypackage
   tlmgr path add

   b. If you don't know the name of the package, but know it should contain mypackage.sty, then you can search using

   tlmgr search --global --all "mypackage.sty"

2. To ensure that you don't have to repeat this step every time you recreate the codespace, add the package name to the list of installs inside the file .devcontainer/installLatex.sh which gets run every time a codespace is created.

3. Better yet, post the name of the missing package to this GitHub issue and we will add it to the devcontainer. This has the advantage that you will still get updates that other authors submit (if you edit the installLatex.sh file, then it won't be updated when you run pretext update).

Troubleshooting: sageplot images

By far the largest space-hog in a PreTeXt authoring environment is SageMath, which is only required if you generate images using sageplots. By default, SageMath is not installed in a PreTeXt codespace, but it should be easy to install if you need it.

Just open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P of F1) and search for "PreTeXt: Install SageMath". This will also update the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file so that the next time you create a codespace for this project, it should install automatically.