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The PreTeXt Guide

Robert A. Beezer, David Farmer, Alex Jordan, Mitchel T. Keller

Section 36.4 Instructor’s Notes

The <commentary> element, as described above, can be used effectively by an individual instructor to customize a personal version of a book. This is not as fine-grained as highlights or annotations, so is not meant as a replacement for tools that support more localized personal additions.
The ideal way to do this would be with a text having source distributed as a git repository, and with notes managed by git. Here is a rough outline, assuming a solid understanding of git.
  1. Clone the author’s repository to a local, personal, location.
  2. Make a long-lived notes branch off the author’s master branch.
  3. Add <commentary> with commits on the notes branch.
  4. Regularly pull master from the original repository to receive updates and fixes from the author.
  5. Regularly merge master into notes so the enhanced version gets the author’s changes without changing master.
  6. Produce personalized output from the notes branch via PreTeXt as normal, with the switch enabling display of the <commentary>.
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