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David W. Farmer edited this page Sep 18, 2020 · 41 revisions

The PreTeXt roadmap

A partially ordered list of planned enhancements, intended as a guide to the developers who will implement these features.

Within the subheadings of "High priority" and "Next level", the individual items are unordered.

The subheading "Event horizon" means that, given the currently available resources, it may be a long time until those features will be implemented, due to the rate of arrival of higher priority requests. The event horizon will move if more development resources become available.

Community

High priority

Enhance the Catalog (https://pretextbook.org/catalog.html) by including more existing projects, adding more badges, and developing a procedure for curating the content.

Make a turnkey script for producing the skeleton of a new project. Perhaps something that asks you for a project name, your name and info, chapter names, section names, and a copyright blurb. And then it makes all the files for such a project with open and close tags in places, and has already filled out other things like xml:id's for the chapters and so on.

Accessibility: guide for authors, standard template/statement

Have some authors write Instructor Guides, and figure out if/how to integrate with the instructor version. Asides in the margin?

Output to ePub, Kindle, braille, what else?

Next level

Finish the MathbookXML to PreTeXt renaming, and move the repository to the PreTeXtBook organization.

Continue writing the Developers' Guide, including items mentioned in this issue: https://github.com/rbeezer/mathbook/issues/1002

Write an Instructor's Guide (generic, about PreTeXt features, which can be integrated into the specific Instructor's Guides) and a brief Student Guide (generic, about PreTeXt features).

Introduce/enhance various useful environments. "Worksheet" could use more attention. If "syllabus" or "conference" existed, then some people would use those. A "schedule" and "participantlist" would be part of a "conference". Surely there are other examples.

LaTeX styling options and documentation for how to use them.

HTML styling options and documentation for how to use them.

Options for HTML dark mode and for modes that enhance accessibility.

User configuration options for HTML version.

Event horizon

Make the HTML output usable when offline.

Core features

High priority

Allow linked Sage cells in knowls https://github.com/rbeezer/mathbook/issues/981

Change HTML structure for videos, so making them browser-width works better

Asides: decide on general principles and types; handle "overlapping" asides and asides in knowls.

Develop and document the process of declaring an annual edition. Popularize the option for HTML with tags that show changes between editions.

Divisional structuring within an "exercises". By topic, by difficulty level, by problem "type", etc.

GeoGebra within WeBWorK.

MathJax3

Next level

Have WeBWorK (and GeoGebra and other applications) as static (or image) and then loaded when selected by the user. (Important because of server and browser load.)

Make knowls more accessible https://github.com/rbeezer/mathbook/issues/1024

Fix other known accessibility issues

Allow AsciiMath in document source.

At-the-ready computational devices: enhance GeoGebra calculator (CAS, spreadhseet mode, etc) and Sage CAS version.

Event horizon

Determine proper markup for bibliographic entries, and then implement it. (Step 1: propose a set of tags. Step 2: someone (maybe someone else) writes the XSL.)

Make "units" work in math.

Javascript

High priority

Fix linked Sage cells

Better student interface for reading questions.

Enable more features in the Instructor version (such as ?????).

Better highlighting: click off menu removes highlight (default is not to highlight?), copy to clipboard should strip html tags (so you can paste into a plain text editor (math may need special attention)), user option to disable highlighting.

Next level

Answering fill-in-the-blank directly in the HTML version. Other types of problems (true/talse, multiple choice, match column A with Column B, Parson's problems (put phrases in the correct order).

Instructor give feedback to reading questions

Refactor pretext.js and more sensibly organize the various Javascript files.

Avoid line break between math and punctuation, but without putting the punctuation inside the math.

Event horizon

Allow expanding and collapsing in the TOC.

Have an infinite scroll: scrolling past the bottom of a page reveals the next section.

Enable drawing on the HTML, to answer questions like "draw the derivative of this function".

CSS

High priority

Create more basic styles, and make it easy for publishers to select them.

Lists are always one-column in mobile (at least, on a narrow screen). More generally, lists use fewer columns instead of overlapping.

Next level

Make new style options for HTML (requires previous item).

sbs figures with different heights but aligned captions (short table vertically centered, next to tall image)