My PreTeXt Course

This README was generated by running pretext new course. You should feel free to edit this to describe your project.

Instructions

The course template includes a single PreTeXt "book" that contains (as chapters) different course documents you might want to share with students. What is included is determined by the main.ptx file in the source folder. The starts of files for a syllabus, weekly notes, activities (worksheets), handouts, and homework are also included.

You can build the course using

pretext build course

and view it with

pretext view course

Also included is the start of a slide deck. This is a single file in the source/slides folder. You could use this for all the slides in a course (as a single slideshow), or create separate slideshows. In that case, you might want to build those separate ones with something like,

pretext build slides -i source/slides/chapter2.ptx

Creating a landing page for multiple targets

Build the entire course with:

pretext build --deploys

This will build both the course "book" and the slide deck. You can create a landing page with links to each of these automatically with the command,

pretext deploy --stage-only

and then view the results with,

pretext view -d

If you then run

pretext deploy

everything will be pushed to github pages.

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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. Then please 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. The next time you update PreTeXt, you should get the better version of the devcontainer and everyone else will benefit as well.

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.

Open the file .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and edit the line that contains

  "image": "pretextbook/pretext:latest",

(or perhaps instead of latest, you have a version number). Change this to

  "image": "pretextbook/pretext-full:latest",

VS Code should prompt you to rebuild your codespace, which you should do (you do not need to do a "full rebuild" though). This docker image contains sagemath and you should be able to add sageplots and generate them successfully now.