Appendix A: Answers to Selected Exercises is ... ugly and incomplete

[APEXCalculus]

This isn't as important as the other things we've been working on, so it is appropriate that it is coming last.

The TLDR: where do I find the code that determines the content of Appendix A? I don't mind doing some editing myself, I just am not sure where to look. The old LaTeX files had a certain process which has now changed.

Here are more specifics:
I feel the Answers section is poorly/oddly formatted and incomplete. Particular issues I have:

1. Chapters are designated with the same font size as other titles. It would be nice to make them a bit larger.

2. The words "Exercises", "Terms and Concepts", and "Problems" appear. They shouldn't.

3. Some odd answers don't appear at all. Often this is the case of Terms and Concept questions. It is true that some of these questions will be answered differently by different students. I think I prefer those to have an answer of "Answers will vary" vs. no answer at all.

4. Related to 3, and very specific: odd numbered "prove using epsilon-delta" problems don't have answers in the back anymore.

Again, the real question is "how do I edit Appendix A?" But I imagine some of my issues are related to more than just a particular block of code.
Thanks.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

In the main apex.ptx file, the solutions are part of the backmatter:

<solutions divisional="answer" admit="odd" label="selected-answers">
        <title>Answers to Selected Exercises</title>
</solutions>

The admit="odd" part tells PreTeXt to do answers to odd-numbered questions only.

We can write divisional="answer solution" if we want to include solutions as well as answers.
An issue that has been only partially addressed is that in the initial conversion, we didn't always do a good job of distinguishing between solution (a step-by-step guide to solving the problem) vs. answer (the final answer at the end).
A lot of answers were coded as solutions.

With regard to the epsilon-delta proofs: those have solutions, not answers, since we provide a detailed proof (while answers tend to be one line or less). We can get them back if we include both answers and solutions.

If a question does not have an answer in the back, it's because it wasn't authored. So if an answer is missing, that's on us.

I can ask about styling (font size, etc.). But the answer/solutions in the back are generated automatically:

• PreTeXt processes all the exercises, and if they contain <answer> or <solution>, it collects those
• All of the headings, layout, etc. follow the exercises themselves. For example, answers are in one or two columns depending on whether or not they come from an exercisegroup with one or two columns.
• The "Terms and Concepts" and "Problems" headings are present because they are present in the exercises. I don't think we can remove them from the answers in the back unless we also remove them in the main text. Maybe there is an override for this; I'll look into it.

[sean-fitzpatrick]

I should also add: since many of the problems are coded in WeBWorK, we get WeBWorK-generated answers.

The main problem with this is that there are many cases where the answer should be given as a fraction or a radical, but instead, we get a decimal. I am not sure how hard it is to program WeBWorK to display the correct answer latex string with the exact value.

Many of the terms and concepts problems were updated to be interactive for use on Runestone, and I probably forgot to keep the "answers will vary", but it's possible to put it back.

[APEXCalculus]

Does the <solutions ... /> environment in PreTeXt establish what that section looks like? I.e., where is the code that determines the look of the answer section?

[sean-fitzpatrick]

The tag is added by the author, to indicate:
(a) Where in the book the solutions should go
(b) What should be included in the solutions (answers, answers and solutions, hints answers and solutions... All problems or odd only, etc.)

But the question is what it looks like is a publisher issue. I asked Rob about the fonts not decreasing in size: the issue is that an author could place solutions as their own appendix, or in a chapter, or in a section, etc.

It sounds like it was too hard to account for all possibilities, and in some cases, you just run out of room: HTML has heading levels h1 through h6. LaTeX has only so many font size levels above the main font.

In a book with
Part/chapter/section/solutions you're already 4 steps down.

The upshot of this: I need to find the XSL that builds the solutions in LaTeX, and rewrite a custom template for APEX.
I'll have a look today, but the code for this is quite complicated, and my time is limited. (Our semester starts on Wednesday.)

[APEXCalculus]

This need not be your problem to solve.
Would this be an addition/edit to apex-latex-print-color.xsl? Not that I know what I'm doing when looking through that stuff...