Gradle build infrastructure for lectures

Gradle infrastructure to build Information Science lectures based on Nigel’s LaTeX lecture classes.

Features:

• multiple configurable document targets: slides, handout, notes, examples
• dynamic targets for building PDF images from PlantUML, SVG, R
• builds separate working preview and final published PDFs with lecture numbers (the latter include the lecture number in the file name)
• uses XeLaTeX via latexmk

This repository serves as both the canonical source for the Gradle files and as an example of how to set things up.

Setting up a new set of lectures

1. Create a top level lectures directory.
2. If you’re using Git, copy .gitignore into lectures.
3. Create a sub-directory for each lecture, e.g., 01_foo, 02_bar, …. The prefix numbering is important. Gradle uses it to figure out the lecture number.
4. Copy build.gradle.kts and settings.gradle.kts into lectures.
5. Create an empty settings.gradle.kts in 01_foo, 02_bar, etc.
6. Copy lecture.gradle.kts into 01_foo, 02_bar, etc.
7. Edit each lecture.gradle.kts to configure targets and images.
8. Add the various content files as outlined below.

Typical lecture directory tree

The way Nigel does things 😁.

lectures
    01_foo/
        build.gradle.kts -> ../build.gradle.kts
        doc_init.tex
        images/
            ...
        lecture.gradle.kts
        lecture_content.tex
        lecture_handout.tex
        lecture_slides.tex
        lecturedates.tex -> ../lecturedates.tex
        paper_init.tex -> ../paper_init.tex
        pdfs/
            lecture_01_handout.pdf
            lecture_01_slides.pdf
        settings.gradle.kts
    02_bar/
        ...
    03_baz etc...
    .gitignore
    build.gradle.kts
    lecturedates.tex
    paper_init_tex
    settings.gradle.kts

Typical gradle tasks

As applicable depending on which document targets are enabled. This list is not comprehensive, see gradle tasks --all for a complete list.

Build tasks

• docs - Build all documents. [preview]
• examples - Build examples document. [preview]
• examples.numbered - Build numbered version of examples document.
• handout - Build handout document. [preview]
• handout.numbered - Build numbered version of handout document.
• images - Generate images.
• notes - Build notes document. [preview]
• notes.numbered - Build numbered version of notes document.
• numbered - Create numbered versions of all documents.
• slides - Build slides document. [preview]
• slides.numbered - Build numbered version of slides document.

A dynamic task is created for each generated image, e.g.:

• images.image1.pdf - Generate image1.pdf from image1.svg.

Housekeeping tasks

• debug - Print debugging information.
• clean - Clean up intermediate files.
• deepClean - Remove all files not in Git. [`git clean -fXd`]