better than copy-paste?

June 5, 2010 10:29 PM

What's the most efficient way to write and publish a textbook with a teacher's edition? Using a Mac.

I'm self-publishing a language textbook specialized for my school. The teacher's edition is really important and contains a lot of additional text for the teacher to read aloud, as well as specific teaching instructions. Is there software or a certain method to facilitate this? I'm familiar with LaTeX, but not proficient.

posted by acidic to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: You might find the Tufte LaTeX classes helpful; they provide the facility for "sidenotes", and offer a very nice general layout. There's an example draft textbook there as well.
posted by gene_machine at 12:53 AM on June 6, 2010

Best answer: If you are doing this through LaTeX, the easiest way is to probably use docstrip. Here is an example (halfway down that page in a comment by Ulrich) for a question very similar to yours. Running latex will generate two files which when compiled again will generate two different finished documents.
posted by hariya at 3:12 AM on June 6, 2010

Response by poster: This was really helpful, I'm using the Tufte book class. I can't figure out how to use docstrip with Lyx but I'm working on it.

Follow up question: I'm producing content a page at a time (equivalent to one class). I'm not working progressively, but eventually will want to reorganize them from easiest to hardest. I want to drag-and-drop whole pages as if they were files or powerpoint slides. Is there anything I can do to facilitate this?
posted by acidic at 2:35 AM on June 7, 2010

Response by poster: Ok, solved both of my problems. For future reference, an easier alternative to docstrip was the package "versions", which worked with the Tufte sidenotes when the similar package "version" did not. And for easy reorganization I saved each page separately and compiled them using \include{}. Thanks again.
posted by acidic at 8:18 AM on June 8, 2010