I am teaching “Introduction to the Study of Literature,” or “English 101,” in the Spring of 2017 at NYU.
This repository is an attempt to use MultiMarkdown in order to generate both a handsome webpage and a handsome pdf of the syllabus at the same time. This is (not) surprisingly rather tricky. However, this is also a template for future syllabi, and I encourage others to tweak this work.
The main file in this syllabus is syllabus.mmd. This is a MultiMarkdown file
setting all of the metadata and building up the structure of the syllabus. Very
little actual text is in this file, as that is all delegated to the files in
the folder sections/.
The metadata include calls to three LaTeX files (available in
latex-support/), but it also has an html header and html footer set,
which provide html-specific text that gets skipped for LaTeX. Most importantly,
at the end of html footer, there are a few jQuery commands that go back
through the html as it exists and fill in text strings.
git clone https://github.com/muziejus/english-101-2017.git
cd english-101-2017
sh process-mmd.sh
biber syllabus
xelatex syllabus.tex ; xelatex syllabus.tex
The process-mmd.sh script relies on MultiMarkdown. Fletcher Penney describes how to install it on the
official site,
but for Mac, assuming you have homebrew installed, it’s as easy as:
brew install --HEAD multimarkdown
A new version of mmd is required, because functionality like html footer is
a recent addition.
process-mmd.sh processes the syllabus.mmd file with mmd and then adds a
little more post-processing to the tex file, like suppressing section numbering
and cleaning up MultiMarkdown’s best guess at how to handle slashes. It then
runs the new .tex version of the syllabus through xelatex.
xelatex is XeLaTeX. It is installed as
part of TeX Live and/or
MacTeX. biber is
Biber, a replacement for BibTeX that
formats the bibliography for the printed version of the document.
The process script also runs mmd syllabus.mmd, and that creates a file,
syllabus.html, which is a self-contained version of the syllabus, styled with
Bootstrap. As a result, it has a pleasant, generic
look, a functioning navbar, responsive layout, and a spy that updates the
navbar based on where you are scrolling. The navbar is built in
sections/navbar.html, and it is only transcluded when outputting to html.
However, traces of its presence remain when outputting to TeX.
Some html-specific stuff is done in the metadata, but the html version cannot
make use of the metadata in the same way the TeX version can. As a result, the
navbar and jQuery commands in html footer might need to be edited by hand.
The pdf version is generated by XeLaTeX, as noted above. XeLaTeX uses the
fontspec package to set its fonts. In this
repository, the fonts are set explicitly in latex-support/second-header.tex.
If you don’t have EB
Garamond or
DejaVu installed, XeLaTeX will throw
a fit. Of course, you could comment out those lines from
latex-support/second-header.tex or install the fonts. They are free.
The bibliography is built using a .bib file and Biber. Explaining how to
build that is way beyond the scope of this document.
This works exactly as I want it to. Any more messing about will simply go into the post-processing script, possibly including a wrapper script that performs all of the commands.
The Bibliography support can be formalized, but as far as I can tell, there’s no clean way to make an html bibliography out of BibTeX/Biber, so it might get put off for a later time.
This is a large reworking of a previous syllabus for a course I taught at NYU, “Does It Work?” in autumn 2016.
In order to get the syllabus to sound “NYUish,” I copied (sometimes very heavily) from a syllabus prepared by my colleague at NYU, Jini Watson. She was also helpful in giving me a sense of what kinds of assignments and homework students could expect at this university. Useful info for someone who’s not taught in a US context in over half a decade!
The specific parameters of the English 101 course were greatly enhanced by syllabi for the same course designed by Carla María Thomas and Rachael Michelle Wilson. The three of us, along with Elizabeth McHenry and Simón Trujillo, are the band of five teaching this new course in Spring 2017, and our lengthy email chain has also influenced this document.
The bravery to create a LaTeX syllabus using the memoir class was fueled by
Kieran Healy’s custom LaTeX
templates. I’ve greatly simplified
his setup, however.
This structure of this GitHub syllabus was once based on Mark Sample's Videogame Studies syllabus, in how it is presented on GitHub.
If you would like to know more about GitHub and syllabi, here are a few ProfHacker articles:
- Forking Your Syllabus (22 March 2012)
- How to Fork a Syllabus on GitHub (12 April 2012)
- Git a Fork in My Syllabus, It’s Done (5 June 2012)
English 101 2017 by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/