About
An authoring and publishing system for authors of textbooks, research articles, and monographs, especially in STEM disciplines.
The best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML.
Outputs: print, PDF, web, EPUB, Jupyter Notebooks, braille, …
(Before June 2017, PreTeXt was called “MathBook XML”, so many of those references remain.)
Gallery and Catalog
The Gallery is a small collection of mature PreTeXt projects that demonstrate the range of features and the diversity of subjects.
The Catalog is a comprehensive list of PreTeXt projects. You can get a sense of the possibilities, and where authors have public source, you can look to see how certain constructions are authored.
Starting Out
Reasonably complete documentation is available off the Documentation page. Start with the PreTeXt Guide, and specifically, the PreTeXt-CLI is the best tool to begin with.
Community
Authors, publishers, readers, and developers congregate on Google Groups (in addition to GitHub issues). The support forum is the easiest, quickest, most accurate way to get help from experienced authors, publishers and developers, even if you are just starting out, and have only read the PreTeXt Guide once.
- Support forum/mailing-list: pretext-support
- Announcements only, low-volume: pretext-announce
- Feature discussions and implementation: pretext-dev
The inactive mathbook-xml-support group can be searched for old questions and their answers.
Code
If you would like to contribute to PreTeXt, then fork the repository at GitHub (GPL license). (None of this is necessary when you use the PreTeXt-CLI.)
OR, install git on your system, then at a command line:
git clone https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext.git
cd pretext And then it is easy to update, and you should do this regularly (daily): git pull
You can download a zip file for initial experiments, but it will very quickly become out-of-date, so this is not recommended. Take the time to setup and become comfortable with “pulling” as described above.
Supporters
- American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
- “Automated production of Braille mathematics textbooks” grant to support work on development of PreTeXt capability to produce Nemeth Braille versions of mathematics textbooks. (May 2019–August 2021)
- Filigris Works
- Filigris Works provided a license for their FlexDoc/XML - XSDDoc (XML Schema Documentation Generator) software which generates our schema browser. (May 2019–May 2020)
- National Science Foundation
- A four-year $2 million grant has been awarded to the UTMOST Project through the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program. (Award No. 1821706) The project will perform an educational research study into the design and use of online textbooks with embedded computational examples. (October 2018–August 2022)
- Bucknell University
- Nathan Wintersgill contributes to PreTeXt development, during the 2017-18 academic year, with the support of the Presidential Fellows program.
- National Science Foundation
- A two-year $700,000 grant has been awarded to the UTMOST Project through the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program. (Award No. 1626455) The project will perform an educational research study into the design and use of online textbooks with embedded computational examples. (September 2016–August 2018)
- University of Puget Sound
- Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences Summer Research for Undergraduates Summer 2016. Jahrme Risner is a Mellon Humanities Research Scholar and his project is to add support to PreTeXt for various features that will be useful for arts and humanitites scholars. Examples include: poetry, bibliographies, musical scores, historical timelines, font support, and translations.
- American Institute of Mathematics
- Author workshop, April 25-29, 2016.
- University of Puget Sound
- Course Release Unit Grant, Spring 2016, for PreTeXt development.
- OpenOregon and University of Puget Sound
- “Enabling Successful, Accessible OER in Mathematics with a WeBWorK-MathBook XML Bridge”, with Alex Jordan, Michael Gage, Goeff Goehle, Summer 2015. Funding from Oregon Community College Distance Learning Association with a matching grant from the University of Puget Sound. [Web Version] [PDF]
- Michael Doob and the The University of Manitoba
- “Faculty of Science Online and Blended Learning Development Grant,” Summer 2015.
- University of Puget Sound
- Course Release Unit Grant, Spring 2014, for textbook writing, which aided design decisions.
- Shuttleworth Flash Grant
- Initial support, Summer and Fall 2013.
- UTMOST
- Undergraduate Teaching of Mathematics and Open Software and Textbooks, National Science Foundation (Grant No. DUE-1022574), Summer 2013.