Fixes to course printing system
Document Actions
If you were here this year, you will remember my battles with the course printing system in preparing Kitty's Introduction to Music Theory as a book to distribute at the TED conference. The single most time-consuming, error-prone part of the effort was moving the solutions to problems to the end of each chapter, and then renumbering the accompanying figure. There were other problems as well, such as the failure to generate unique labels/ids in LaTeX because the moduleid of the context module was unavailable.
This past weekend I finished up changes to the course printing that I believe fix the worst of these problems, namely the placement of solutions and the label-generation problems. I also made some cosmetic adjustments (including the course URI on the contributing authors page, modifying the copyright date, and changing from 'cnx.rice.edu' to 'cnx.org' in most places). The cosmetic changes and the fix that made moduleids always available I committed to printing/trunk. For the grouping of solutions in a section at the end of each chapter I created a branch 'printing/solutions-branch' and committed there. I have tested the code on the intro to music theory and on the course built by Minh Do for the DSP Summer School in Vietnam. It works as expected on these courses, though there are still at least three kinds of manual intervention required in making a suitable course PDF:
- Arranging figures in solutions so that they appear with their solutions (mostly by inserting \newline to break pages.
- Adjusting image widths for images that come out too large or too small in the PDF.
- Adjusting the LaTeX tables (column widths, page breaks); rather kludgy at times.
