Brainstorm on live structured documents

See also the report for D4.2: Active/Structured Documents Requirements and existing Solutions for a comparison of Jupyter notebooks and MathHub.info active documents.

Potential approaches

Jupyter notebook export facility for Sphinx

• Preliminary work by Harald Shilly (motivation: sage documentation): https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/pull/2117

• Experimental script using pandoc+notedown: https://github.com/nthiery/rst-to-ipynb (Nicolas + ...)

  • For some output, see: http://Nicolas.Thiery.name/Enseignement/Agregation/

    Update 01/2017: Now available as sage -rst2ipynb (see https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/21513, https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/21514)

Embedding Jupyter notebooks inside Sphinx documents

http://nbsphinx.readthedocs.org/en/0.2.5/

Thebe (by Oreilly)

https://github.com/oreillymedia/thebe

Javascript library for embedding live cells connected to a Jupyter kernel in any html page.

Live documentation for Sage with Sphinx and Thebe

This was implemented by Florent Cayré and Nicolas Thiéry at and after the Sage Days in http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/20690. See https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/20893 for a follow up.

MathBookXML

MathBookXML is an infrastructure for authoring large documents, in XML formats, with export to latex, html, Sage, SMC, Jupyter notebook. We enjoyed a remote presentation by its main author Robert Beezer.

Example of book: Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, Tom Judson

• Print: http://www.amazon.com/Abstract-Algebra-Applications-Thomas-Judson/dp/0989897591

• PDF: http://abstract.ups.edu/download/aata-20150812.pdf

• HTML: http://abstract.ups.edu/aata/

• Source: https://github.com/twjudson/aata

• Clone: git clone https://github.com/twjudson/aata.git

Nice features

• Knowls (temporary widgets showing pieces of text, like proofs, other end of references or citations)
• Active cells, connected to the Sage single cell server (all cells sharing the same evaluation context)
• Possibility for the author to control the granularity of the output (one page per section, or subsection or ...)
• Internationalization / multiple versions of the document (e.g. with or without solutions) / multiple output formats (pdf, html, epub)
• Sidebar with table of contents, ...
• Formal Grammar (dtd)
• Mobile ready
• TikZ support

• Export vers notebook Sage, SageMathCloud, Jupyter (with the know structural problems)

Someone wrote a latex to XML translator to be able to author in latex.

MathBook XML resources

Site: http://mathbook.pugetsound.edu/ DTD: http://mathbook.pugetsound.edu/doc/dtd/

Potential for collaborations:

• Rendering features of MathBookXML:
  • knowls logic (preview of theoremshttp://www.aimath.org/knowlepedia/)
  • Mobile support
  • Handling of tikz pictures
• Exporting the ReST to XML to be fed into MathBookXML?
  • (there is a detailed DTD specifying the format)
• Reusing the Jupyter kernel logic from Thebe in MathBookXML to let it work with Jupyter servers (tmpnb, local, ...)
• Joint feature development: multiplying a given cell (adding above, adding below, splitting)