Ma 375 - Communicating Mathematics Carl Eberhart and Paul Eakin Class 17 Building books of worksheets with Perl scripts

Today we will show how use hyperlinks and bookmarks to make a book of worksheets, and also show how to use two perl scripts, mkcontents.pl and mkindex.pl to build a table of contents worksheet and an index worksheet.

A book of worksheets is a set of worksheets which are connected by hyperlinks. You can think of a directed graph where the vertices are the worksheets and the edges are the hyperlinks. There are many forms such a graph might take: A linear (circular?) book of worksheets A rooted book of worksheets

Since hyperlinks can get you to a bookmark in a worksheet your vertices have to be thought of as ‘fat’ worksheet 1 worksheet 2 worksheet 3 bookmark hyperlink

To construct a table of contents worksheet by hand, simply open a new worksheet and insert a hyperlink to each worksheet in your book of worksheets. To construct one with the perl script mkcontents.pl 1. put the names of the worksheets in the book in a file, one name to a line. Put in the .mws suffix. 2. From the TeXShell, execute the perl script with the command perl -S mkcontents toc.mws fileofworksheets where toc.mws is the name you want for the table of contents worksheet and fileofworksheets is the name of the file containing the names of the

To make an index worksheet, 1. bookmark all of the items in all of the worksheets in your book. You can only put one bookmark per paragraph. 2. From a TexShell, issue the command perl -S mkindex index.mws toc.mws fileofworksheets where index.mws is the name of your index worksheet toc.mws is the name of your table of contents worksheet and fileofworksheets is the file where you have listed the names of the worksheets in the book.

Homework Assignment: due Monday, March 30 Take a collection of three or more worksheets from the Chisel disk, and bookmark them and otherwise modify them however you want to. Then construct a table of contents worksheet, either by hand or with mkcontents.pl and construct an index worksheet with mkindex.pl. Finally, put in a hyperlink back to the table of contents worksheet from each worksheet in your book. Send me an email when you have completed the task, describing what you did and any difficulties you had in carrying out the task.