For the past couple years, I’ve been using SVN for version control. It was my first introduction to these tools and it took a while to get the hang of branching, tagging, and resolving the dreaded conflicts. But now it’s an integral part of my workflow and I can’t count the number of times it’s saved my digital bacon.
However I recently switched to GitHub for some of my projects. This was partly out of curiosity, as a number of prominent projects and coders seem to swear by it (Twitter, Hadley Wickham, Kieran Healy). But more practically, I didn’t want to be tied to a single server any more and the idea of a Git repository as a self-standing archive was very appealing.
I’ve now been using Git for a couple weeks and, again, I’ve had to figure out a new mystical language of push, pull, fetch, merge, etc. If you’re familiar with SVN or CVS, the trickiest thing is trying to figure out the Git analogues of all your usual tricks. Git from the bottom up is a fantastic resource in this regard and provides a clear explanation of Git’s internal structure and how to work with it. For more mundane, how-do-I-do-x type things, Github’s Help is very, umm, helpful.
Anyway, all that’s not really here nor there. I mainly wanted to announce my first real Git project: lectures! It’s a collection of LaTeX style files and Python glue to make the creation of both lecture notes and slides much easier. If you’ve used beamer, you’ll know that you can build these two sets of documents from a single source file – provided you’ve got two separate header files. With lectures, all you have to do is write a single source file and run a simple command:
> build-lecture source style
Out pops two PDF files, one for presentation and one with your full notes. There is also support for some basic style configuration. I’ve tried to keep this to a minimum, such as changing fonts (with XeLaTeX for OpenType support) and colours.
Have a go, try the code, and let me know what you think!
PS: I’ve just noticed that a similar project exists called BeamerLecture. Looks like the main difference is that it produces four outputs, hiding answers in pre-class notes, which is a nice feature. The formatting is closer to the beamer defaults though and it doesn’t use XeLaTeX for easy font changes.
