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Lesson plan generation

On the staging.code.org server, lesson plan PDFs are generated from certain folders.

The typical build cycle is:

  1. A change to a .md or .collate file is made via Dropbox and detected on staging
  2. A PDF is generated from that file
  3. The original PDF is moved to S3, and a .fetch file is put in its place, pointing to the uploaded copy

Create PDFs with curriculum folder .md files

Adding a new lesson plan PDF

  1. Create a new folder for the lesson plan
  2. Currently must be a number, e.g. 1 or 15
  3. Add the title of the course to a file info.yml
  4. (optional) Add any extra styles to morestyle.css
  5. Create a file with the extension .md. Lesson plans are currently all named Teacher.md

Join PDFs with .collate files

.collate files contain a list of either: (1) relative paths to PDFs or (2) URLs to remote PDFs.

On staging, a cron task joins the PDFs in these .collate files together and places them where the .collate file is (same filename, minus the .collate extension).

Numbering PDFs with numbers option

Page numbers can be applied to .collate-generated PDFs.

At the top of the .collate file, add YAML front matter with the following variable set:

---
numbers: true
---

# My normal content

Dropbox integration

There are different Dropbox shares named curriculum-course* and curriculum-docs which sync to the corresponding folders in /pegasus/sites/virtual.

For Dropbox folder access, ask Brendan or anyone with Dropbox Pegasus Staging account access.

Adding functionality

/pegasus/src/course.rb and /pegasus/sites/virtual/generate_curriculum_pdfs.rake are good starting points for some of the PDF generation logic.

Local testing dependencies

  • Ubuntu: sudo aptitude install pdftk enscript
  • OS X: 
    brew install https://raw.github.com/quantiverge/homebrew-binary/pdftk/pdftk.rb
brew install enscript

To run PDF collation tests

The PDF collation tests should now be run during the pegasus test cycle.

To run the individual test manually:

  1. bundle install
  2. cd code-dot-org/pegasus/test
  3. bundle exec ruby -Itest test_pdf_merger.rb