Lecture Notes Template

Template for creates a set of lecture notes

Three versions of the notes

This template produces three sets of notes:

1. Master copy (all black text) and sidenotes.
2. Gapped notes (blank boxes).
3. Gapped notes, with text filled in in blue.

Running the notes

To create all three versions of the notes, just run:

./makeRmd.sh

Content

• The content .Rmd files are contained in the chapters folder.
• Subsections which contain code are contained in the Rcode folder.

Some features

• Creates notes in PDF format.
• Includes frameboxes for parts that will be gapped.
• Can customise syntax colours (see preamble.tex).
• Can include tikz figures.
• Can increase the space in the frameboxes.

Output

The makeRmd.R script is able to create three sets of notes by using the separate configuration files:

• _bookdown.yml
• _bookdown_gap.yml
• _bookdown_gapfilled.yml

These will lead to three separate PDFs being created in the output_notes directory.

Customing the options

To see how to change the options, look at the file makeRmd.R which does the heavy lifting in R. For example, you may not want to compile all three sets every time. I played around with passing a parameter to makeRmd.sh, but in the end it is easier to just comment out the appropriate lines in makeRmd.R.

Output options

There are the following parameters in a list in each bookdown::render_book call. For example, the 'master copy' for the lecturer has the following parameter list:

params = list(showtextparam = 'true',
              useframe = 'true', 
              gaptextisblue = 'false',
              showsidenotes = 'true',
              moreboxspace = 'false', 
              vhval = '0.9')

• showtextparam controls whether or not the text in the frame boxes is displayed or not (these are the gaps, when this is set to false).
• useframe controls whether or not the gaps are surrounded by a frame box.
• gaptextisblue - as the name suggests, if true then the text in the frame boxes is in blue (this is used for the student version, but not the lecturer's version).
• showsidenotes controls whether notes in the margin (to remind the lecturer) to emphasise/say certain points are displayed or not.
• moreboxspace controls whether or not the gapped frameboxes are wider than usual. At the moment this is always set to false, but if we wished to make the boxes wider to give the students more space to fill in the box with their handwriting, this could be set to true.
• vhval, abbreviations for vertical height value, this is tied to moreboxspace when that flag is true. Sets the amount of additional vertical space in the framebox. A value of 0.9 is actually quite large, and perhaps a value of 0.2 would even be enough, but this default value will at least make it obvious what this parameter is doing. Note: this value is used in the command \vspace{0.9cm}.

It would be possible to not hardcode the options, and predefine the lists, but this would involve setting the flag clean_envir=F, which I would prefer not to do.

Printing code chunks

Note that grey code box is not printed; not sure how to resolve this.

Ignoring _bookdown_files directory

The .gitignore file ignores the _bookdown_files directory, because there are many files in it, and only these base files are needed to create the PDFs.

Dependencies

At a minimum, the following need to be installed:

• R programming language
• pandoc
• rmarkdown package for R
• bookdown package for R

To make the example work, the following R packages need to be installed:

xtable
rmarkdown
bookdown
grid
gridExtra
tikzDevice)
ggplot2

Credits

Special thanks to Din-Houn Lau for inspiration, sharing his LaTeX/Sweave solution which produces a set of three notes (as this approach does), and for sharing his LaTeX approach using booleans and \vphantom for creating/filling in the gaps.

For the R Markdown side of thiongs, I had a lot of help from loads of examples on the internet (especially on Stackoverflow); there are some commented links in the raw files to particularly helpful posts.. I was also inspired by the Rcpp-FAQ Vignette, although I ended up using a different output format.