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Authoring: experience after many hours

After many hours of authoring/translating of the LEAM calculus course, these are my findings: - Auhoring and translating are painstakingly slow. - It’s hard to track changes when one authors a very large file (e.g. exercise files)

And I know xml, the general infrastructure of activemath etc..

If Activemath wants to attract more authors it has to have better tools. For translating the Drupal approach with languages would be nice. For authoring itself a simple wysiwyg would be nice (I would say even compulsory). Even if you take into account that semantics and metadata don’t benefit from this, I really feel our community will stay small if we can’t provide for this.

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examples wished!

Christian,

it’s not the first time you state such but everytime you do so very fuzzily.

Right now I understand from your post that:

  • you are tired at editing the oqmath files
  • the tools are slow for such mass of information
  • you loose overview of changes at editing exercises
  • you wish a visual editor

But also you indicate porting the drupal approach into there would be nice… I do not see how this would solve any of the problems above. Or… I have not understood it. Is the fact that reload and preview cycles are that slow?

There could be things done to gain better overview of changes, for now, I can only offer undo and subversion diffing but those two are quite powerful tools already!

Maybe being more detailed would help us elaborate a plan or simply help.
Maybe there are annoyances that delay you a lot?

paul
wishing to help

Paul,“* you are tired at

Paul,

”* you are tired at editing the oqmath files” NO “* the tools are slow for such mass of information” NO “you loose overview of changes at editing exercises” YES “you wish a visual editor” YES and NO

I’ll manage, even though editing an oqmath file with for example exercises takes a lot of time. It’s not about ME. If we want Activemath to be used more broadly, the knowledge required for authoring is too large. I’m using my knowledge on mathematics teachers in the Netherlands to guess that the current process will put almost everyone off. As I said, I can manage, but why not try making things simpler?

“But also you indicate porting the drupal approach into there would be nice… I do not see how this would solve any of the problems above. Or… I have not understood it.” In Drupal -see www.activemath.org/eu- there is ONE translation, e.g. English and I can create a translation, say dutch, I can then edit. Whilst I’m doing this I can stop halfway and store changes..etc. I would feel a same facility: edit the text within CMPs (not the metadata, for quick editing), store it halfway (because some files are just too large to translate in one go). This thus provides a sort of online SVN. The “visual” tool I mean would be no more than a webpage on which you can load a page -if you’re an author or administrator- shows an existing language (english) and an empty box next to it for the dutch translation. Is this clear enough?

“Is the fact that reload and preview cycles are that slow?” NO