Section4A Gallery of Examples
Although undoubtedly everyone is excited to get authoring, let's look at some examples.
Subsection4.1The Sample Article
Let's look at several different types of examples. Most, but not all, will be linked from the PTX documentation samples page or the gallery on the main page.
The documentation for PTX is a bit strange. Eventually everything will end up in an excellent Author's Guide, which indeed already has some great work. The Philosophy section is particularly good, and the feature overview is a helpful synopsis. We have also provided a cheatsheet we hope will be helpful.
However, for more detail and good in-context examples, the place to go is:
The sample article is a free-form and entertaining compendium of nearly everything PTX can do. It is well worth a full read – including the source! Some of my favorite sections are the ones for special characters and list calisthenics. Let's take a look at a few things.
One important point to note throughout is the full incorporation of traditional book publishing conventions, such as front matter, appendices, copyright information, and so forth, in the usual places.
Remember, the source shows so much. One key piece of syntax to be aware of (for now, later to master) is the use of xml:id as a way to later enable cross-references that move wherever you put them. This enables hyperlinks, consistent cross-referencing by number or title, as well as links in pdfs.
I could basically just show this off all day and we would be suitably impressed. However, it's not the best use of your time. The moral is to keep the sample article in mind any time you wonder if something is possible.
Subsection4.2A gallery of examples
There are several different types of projects out there. Here are several examples showing different things we thought worthwhile enough to send you in the initial email, along with a couple others.
Matt Boelkins et al. have produced Active Calculus in a new PTX format. This project really has everything, from activities to tables, graphs to hyperlinks.
Looking for a good practical example of interleaving videos, math, custom figures, tables, and WeBWorK exercises? Portland Community College's ORCCA project is very good. Note the custom logo!
There are two main approaches to using SageMath cells. In Number Theory: In Context and Interactive, the idea is using the
@interactfunctionality (such as in this example originally in Bressoud and Wagon) to allow exploration.On the other hand, in Beezer's exercises for Judson's Abstract Algebra text, Sage exercises are intentionally separated and more sophisticated.
Judson's Ordinary Differential Equations demonstrates using graphics and figures generated using SageMath code.
The project aims to support many pedagogies; Levin's Discrete Math text is a great example of using customization and investigations (not to mention graphs).
Keller and Trotter's Applied Combinatorics text has lots of exercises and solutions.
There are other examples worth pointing out for other reasons, though we won't focus on them today.
Doerr and Levasseur's Applied Discrete Structures is a known (dare one say venerable?) text that demonstrates the possibility of doing some fairly sophisticated conversion from existing source. There are very nice uses of the image generation facilities of Sage and PTX here.
Bob Plantz has a textbook in computer science that demonstrates some good use of code examples, tables, and images like decision diagrams.
On the other hand, you may wish to simply write a paper that can be archived in a form other than pdf. Lead developer Rob Beezer did this with a Monthly paper, and the American Institute of Mathematics supports PTX largely for this potential.
There are many other projects in progress – I haven't even mentioned several which will be presented tomorrow most of the day in the “Open Educational Resources” contributed paper session. Or see this pretext-announce thread for other open textbook sessions here. Will you be the next author?