Recurrence relations

[Alex-Jordan]

Here's a section on recurrence relations, ready for you to review. When you have the time, please do give feedback both on the content and on the formatting of the code. I'm happy to make any suggested changes.

[Alex-Jordan]

Oh I meant to say:

• the honeybees example seems to be common in recurrence relation/Fibonacci discussions. I don't recall where or when I first heard about it. The writing itself is all my own; no plagiarism issues.
• the elderberries and rats examples came from my imagination working to come up with a plausible context for a recurrence relation. I harvest elderberries every now and then, and it's true that different branches fruit in different ways. Once I saw a documentary about somewhere in Asia where every once in a while, the rat population explodes in the jungle. That inspired the rats example, but not any mathematical details; just a story about lots of rats. I have no idea if these contexts have been used in textbooks before.
• the generic exercises are all my own.

[rbeezer]

Marked-up PDF in your email. Looking very good.

[rbeezer]

You can ignore all those right margin intrusions I marked up in what I sent you. Design width is 6.25 inches at 12pt, which is wider than default MBX. Lots of room. I've made a new stanza for the Makefile that reflects this - I'll push it up once this section is merged.

[rbeezer]

Oops, Makefile is not public (and not real useful). Use on the xsltproc invocation:

--stringparam "latex.font.size" "12pt" 
--stringparam "latex.geometry" "letterpaper,total={6.25in,9.0in}"

[rbeezer]

Ready for another look now? I might have some time tonight.

[Alex-Jordan]

One more thing... This morning I realized a cleaner way to explain the bee
recurrence. Obsessing, I know... I'll ping you if I get it up today. Aside
from that, it's ready.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Rob Beezer [email protected]
wrote:

Ready for another look now? I might have some time tonight.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

[rbeezer]

OK, thanks. No rush at all. Just looked at Chris' work and owe Tom Judson some
help. So I have plenty to do. Obsessing is good.

On 03/01/2015 01:06 PM, Alex Jordan wrote:

One more thing... This morning I realized a cleaner way to explain the bee
recurrence. Obsessing, I know... I'll ping you if I get it up today. Aside
from that, it's ready.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Rob Beezer [email protected]
wrote:

Ready for another look now? I might have some time tonight.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

[Alex-Jordan]

OK, it's ready for review whenever you are ready. I'm going to walk away
from any more revisions until they come as editing suggestions from you.

As you can see in one commit, I have a question about font in the
latex-images. I'm using a tikz-based environment called forest, where you
can use text. And I have, with labels for the levels of the tree. Such text
will use the ambient font. So for PDF, the font here will be consistent
with the surrounding text (although shrunk in size because the whole image
is shrunk to fit.)

In HTML though, I assume the font for the body will remain a sans serif
font. And yet the mbx script has created that image in a standalone
environment, which has CM Roman as the font. To me, the serifed font in the
image clashes with the surrounding body sans serif.

Now, maybe not everyone wants sans serif in their HTML. (Side note: is this
being controlled by CSS?) But if that is at least the default, it would be
easy to put \sfseries into the template in extract-latex-image, so that the
standalone was made with sans serif, even while the full LaTeX was made
with Roman. Does this sound like a good, bad, or neither idea? I realize it
would also effect pdf output from the mbx script, but so far I haven't seen
what that is used for other than as a waypoint to svg.

Or would a better idea be to indicate some kind of font preference in
docinfo, and use that? It's just hard, because I can see people wanting the
HTML in one font but the print in another.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Alex Jordan [email protected] wrote:

One more thing... This morning I realized a cleaner way to explain the bee
recurrence. Obsessing, I know... I'll ping you if I get it up today. Aside
from that, it's ready.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Rob Beezer [email protected]
wrote:

Ready for another look now? I might have some time tonight.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

[rbeezer]

Dear Alex,

I appreciate the attention to detail. ;-)

I feel like we are pretty far ahead of the game, being able to create images
with a source language and get both PDF and HTML. And I totally understand the
concern/desire for a uniform look.

Once a project settles down, I build the images once and then commit them to the
repo, just so people have them and can tinker without figuring out mbx.

Could we build the recurrence relation images later by sneaking \sfseries into
latex-extra-preamble temporarily? Then commit them. We'd have consistency in
both formats, no? A hack. Fonts (like Greek) are going to be a major hurdle,
this feels like it is pretty far down the list. What do you think? Workable?
Agreeable?

A processing switch would be another avenue: latex.image-code.preamble, say. I
am not migrating these into mbx yet, but would like to.

I'm pretty sure we do not want font preferences in the source - it does not
really belong there at all. Even docinfo, I think.

The fonts come from Google (you've seen that) and some care was taken to use
good on-screen fonts. I'm not sure how replaceable they are. for
latex-inclusion is PDF, but you are right, for latex-image-code to HTML, the PDF
is just intermediate.

Rob

On 03/01/2015 01:29 PM, Alex Jordan wrote:

OK, it's ready for review whenever you are ready. I'm going to walk away
from any more revisions until they come as editing suggestions from you.

As you can see in one commit, I have a question about font in the
latex-images. I'm using a tikz-based environment called forest, where you
can use text. And I have, with labels for the levels of the tree. Such text
will use the ambient font. So for PDF, the font here will be consistent
with the surrounding text (although shrunk in size because the whole image
is shrunk to fit.)

In HTML though, I assume the font for the body will remain a sans serif
font. And yet the mbx script has created that image in a standalone
environment, which has CM Roman as the font. To me, the serifed font in the
image clashes with the surrounding body sans serif.

Now, maybe not everyone wants sans serif in their HTML. (Side note: is this
being controlled by CSS?) But if that is at least the default, it would be
easy to put \sfseries into the template in extract-latex-image, so that the
standalone was made with sans serif, even while the full LaTeX was made
with Roman. Does this sound like a good, bad, or neither idea? I realize it
would also effect pdf output from the mbx script, but so far I haven't seen
what that is used for other than as a waypoint to svg.

Or would a better idea be to indicate some kind of font preference in
docinfo, and use that? It's just hard, because I can see people wanting the
HTML in one font but the print in another.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Alex Jordan [email protected] wrote:

One more thing... This morning I realized a cleaner way to explain the bee
recurrence. Obsessing, I know... I'll ping you if I get it up today. Aside
from that, it's ready.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Rob Beezer [email protected]
wrote:

Ready for another look now? I might have some time tonight.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

[Alex-Jordan]

That all sounds good. This is all a byproduct of using standalone, which
has no context to choose a font from. Someday that can change.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Rob Beezer [email protected] wrote:

Dear Alex,

I appreciate the attention to detail. ;-)

I feel like we are pretty far ahead of the game, being able to create
images
with a source language and get both PDF and HTML. And I totally understand
the
concern/desire for a uniform look.

Once a project settles down, I build the images once and then commit them
to the
repo, just so people have them and can tinker without figuring out mbx.

Could we build the recurrence relation images later by sneaking \sfseries
into
latex-extra-preamble temporarily? Then commit them. We'd have consistency
in
both formats, no? A hack. Fonts (like Greek) are going to be a major
hurdle,
this feels like it is pretty far down the list. What do you think?
Workable?
Agreeable?

A processing switch would be another avenue: latex.image-code.preamble,
say. I
am not migrating these into mbx yet, but would like to.

I'm pretty sure we do not want font preferences in the source - it does
not
really belong there at all. Even docinfo, I think.

The fonts come from Google (you've seen that) and some care was taken to
use
good on-screen fonts. I'm not sure how replaceable they are.
for
latex-inclusion is PDF, but you are right, for latex-image-code to HTML,
the PDF
is just intermediate.

Rob

On 03/01/2015 01:29 PM, Alex Jordan wrote:

OK, it's ready for review whenever you are ready. I'm going to walk away
from any more revisions until they come as editing suggestions from you.

As you can see in one commit, I have a question about font in the
latex-images. I'm using a tikz-based environment called forest, where you
can use text. And I have, with labels for the levels of the tree. Such
text
will use the ambient font. So for PDF, the font here will be consistent
with the surrounding text (although shrunk in size because the whole
image
is shrunk to fit.)

In HTML though, I assume the font for the body will remain a sans serif
font. And yet the mbx script has created that image in a standalone
environment, which has CM Roman as the font. To me, the serifed font in
the
image clashes with the surrounding body sans serif.

Now, maybe not everyone wants sans serif in their HTML. (Side note: is
this
being controlled by CSS?) But if that is at least the default, it would
be
easy to put \sfseries into the template in extract-latex-image, so that
the
standalone was made with sans serif, even while the full LaTeX was made
with Roman. Does this sound like a good, bad, or neither idea? I realize
it
would also effect pdf output from the mbx script, but so far I haven't
seen
what that is used for other than as a waypoint to svg.

Or would a better idea be to indicate some kind of font preference in
docinfo, and use that? It's just hard, because I can see people wanting
the
HTML in one font but the print in another.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Alex Jordan [email protected] wrote:

One more thing... This morning I realized a cleaner way to explain the
bee
recurrence. Obsessing, I know... I'll ping you if I get it up today.
Aside
from that, it's ready.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Rob Beezer [email protected]
wrote:

Ready for another look now? I might have some time tonight.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1 (comment).

Alex Jordan
Mathematics Instructor
Portland Community College

[rbeezer]

Very good! Merged. Thanks very much for the first contribution.

I squashed down all the commits. I also uncommented your name, which looks fine in HTML, and is just a bit large in LaTeX. Should fix that soon.

There are two "exercise list" problems in LaTeX which I also need to fix - this will be a good reminder to do that. ;-)

[Alex-Jordan]

Closing this now.