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. Copy lecture.build.gradle.kts into 01_foo, 02_bar, etc., and rename it to build.gradle.kts
6. Edit each lecture’s build.gradle.kts to configure targets and images.
7. Add the various content files as outlined below.

Typical lecture directory tree

The way Nigel does things 😁.

lectures
    01_foo/
        build.gradle.kts
        doc_init.tex
        images/
            ...
        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
    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`]