Hello, @june21-cohort! I hope you all are doing well. This month we will once again be doing individual check-in meetings rather than a full-group meeting. We’ll reconvene as a full group for our final meeting in May. Please use this calendar to sign up for a time slot. As was the case last month, the signup form asks you to include some information about questions you have and challenges you’re facing. This will help me to better prepare for our meetings and hopefully help you to get the most benefit out of these meetings. If you can’t find a time that works for you, please let me know so that we can try to work out an alternative time. And if you didn’t already, please include you goals that you’ve been working toward in our March thread. If you have any questions, please include them here in the forum. I look forward to seeing you all. Take care!
@sharris1 - I’d like to connect you with @arwalz, who has had some experience working with OER projects in LaTeX! Anita, Shamecca and @nmadamopoulos are currently working on an Electromagnetics OER as part of the June 2021 TSP cohort, and would love to connect with you about tips you have about working in LaTeX and ensuring easy transfer to Pressbooks down the road.
Hi Shamecca and @nmadamopoulos,
(Thanks Apurva)
I’d be happy to talk with you. I’ve worked on several math-intensive books in Pressbooks. The main ones are:
- Intro to Statistics (LaTeX)
- Aerodynamics and Aircraft Performance (MathML)
You can find these two and those mentioned below at https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oer/grantees
Our Electromagnetics texts were created, formatted, and everything in LaTeX. For accessibility reasons we tried but struggled so much with ingesting them into Pressbooks that we decided not to pursue that route. Individual equations work well in PB, ingesting LaTeX sourcefiles (as an entire document) unfortunately did not work well – at least at that point 2-3 years ago.
If you plan to move something from LaTeX into Pressbooks, you’ll need to basically remove all of the formatting code from the LaTeX, but keep the math and figure out how to handle any in-text special characters. (Pressbooks does not allow “in line” LaTeX – LaTeX within a text paragraph.)
The other option is to work with the generated pdf, scrape it into Pressbooks as plaintext and manually create the math using a tool like MathPix (which now has a subscription fee). Again, lots of work.
It seems like a lot of undoing of author sourcefiles that might be more valuable and easier left as LaTeX.
Our reason for exploringPressbooks was accessibility. If that is a concern, getting your publication on to the web (I am told) makes things far more accessible. (This video may be of interest: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/102607) And this (LaTeX to HTML workflow) was developed by my former colleague and may be of interest:
https://libguides.sfsu.edu/latex/generating-html Note that I have not yet implemented this. I would not recommend the level of effort of tagging the pdf – way too much work. Accessibility is best “baked into” the process rather than tacked on at the end.
I commiserate with you! Math is sooo tricky!
Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk further.
Anita
Monthly Goals
- Fine tune the content and material
- Review interactive components
- Finish up pieces such as preface/foreward, glossary of terms, etc
- Start to put into Pressbooks
Dear Anita,
Thanks for the follow up. Let me look into these links and I will get back to you.
Best,
NM
Goals for next month.
- Continue working on content.
- Revisit accessibility issues for math
- Meet with collaborator and confirm dates
Thank you @arwalz! @nmadamopoulos Let’s touch base sometime next week to brainstorm ways that I can assist with the conversion