From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Brian van den Broek Subject: Re: Create course material with org-mode Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:56:28 -0400 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([208.118.235.92]:36962) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UFAiW-0005IF-EX for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:57:17 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UFAiU-0003Yu-GC for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:57:12 -0400 Received: from mail-vc0-f174.google.com ([209.85.220.174]:37996) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UFAiU-0003Yc-B2 for emacs-orgmode@gnu.org; Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:57:10 -0400 Received: by mail-vc0-f174.google.com with SMTP id n11so2306213vch.19 for ; Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:57:09 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: List-Id: "General discussions about Org-mode." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: emacs-orgmode-bounces+geo-emacs-orgmode=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: Torsten Wagner Cc: Org Mode Mailing List On 9 March 2013 17:21, Torsten Wagner wrote: > Hi, > > I plan to create new course materials for teaching at university level. > I'm looking for a system which enables me to keep all materials together and > to reuse as much as possible the same source files. > > E.g., for a particular topic, I would love to create all the above materials > within a single file. This would help me to keep it among all materials > coherent, correct errors and do updates effectively and save (hopefully) a > lot of time. Hi Torsten, I thought I'd muddy your waters by throwing a contrary voice into the mix :-) I've been refining the way I manage my college and uni teaching with org for 5+ years, now. I am making extensive use of the scheduling and TODO functionality. I am not storing course materials in the org files. I found that I could not get by with just one teaching.org file, but instead needed to break out each class into its own org file. With everything in one, even on my pretty beefy box (quad core i7, 8GB RAM) there was too much of a periodic lag when editing the org file for that to be comfortable. On my netbook (which I take to the office as the College insists I need a Windows box on my desk), the lag made working with the file far too painful. I've not tried putting my (extensive) LaTeX beamer slides sources, exams, etc. into the org files, but I fear the lag would again occur. I've been keeping all course related material other than the org files which manage scheduling into a seperate directory under git version control and I link from the org file's scheduled tasks to the relevant course related materials. It seems to be working in that I am halfway through the term and am at most a week behind :-) Having those materials in nested dirs in the filesystem is helpful, too; it allows granular use of things like $git log . and that often gives me a better sense of what I've been up to than would running git log against one monster all in org file. I don't however too much by way of multiple outputs derived from common sources. I let LaTeX beamer's facilities take care of prodicing a display and a downloadable version of my slides. That just needs two short master files which \include the body of the slides. What duplication I have is in things like tests and paper topics when I have multiple sections of the same course in a term, differing only in section numbers and dates. The duplication is a bit inellegant, but it is not extensive enough for me to worry about the overhead of avoiding it. And, disk space is approximately free, at least if one is worried about having duplicates of latex sources that generate a few pages. HTH, Brian vdB