Textbook Assembler

A tool for assembling a collection of PDF resources into a single "textbook"

While it's nice to teach from a textbook, the modern teacher has a huge array of resources to pull from, including unpublished notes, lecture slides, and even code repositories. Providing students with these resources as a huge library of PDFs is intimidating, disorienting, and confusing. This is especially true when you don't need the entire resource, only a few pages or slides.

This package aims to solve this problem by giving teachers an easy way to merge a large volume of files into a single "textbook", which can then be distributed to students. References and links are added to ensure proper credit assignment for everything used in the class.

Usage

Install the package using pip:

pip install textbook-assembler

To run the script with default arguments, use:

python -m textbook_assembler.main

The following arguments are available:

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --lesson_path LESSON_PATH, -l LESSON_PATH
                        Path to the CSV file containing the lesson plan for the textbook
  --source_dir SOURCE_DIR, -s SOURCE_DIR
                        Path to directory containing PDFs to be assembled
  --output_path OUTPUT_PATH, -o OUTPUT_PATH
                        Output path for the assembled textbook
  --bibtex_path BIBTEX_PATH, -b BIBTEX_PATH
                        Path a bibtex file containing reference information for the PDFs in the lesson plan
  --ref_path REF_PATH, -r REF_PATH
                        Path to YAML with mapping between bibtex references and source files

The defaults are:

    --lesson_plan materials/lesson_plan.csv
    --source_dir materials/pdfs
    --output_path materials/output/textbook.pdf
    --bibtex_path materials/citations.bib
    --ref_path materials/ref_to_file.yaml

Details and Example

The script requires 4 inputs:

1. A directory of PDF files to be assembled
2. A "lesson plan", a csv file with the following columns: week, date, topic, reference, chapter, page_start, page_end
3. A YAML file mapping bibtex reference ids to PDF file names
4. A bibtex file with citations for all documents included in the lesson plan

An example setup is provided in the materials/ directory.

Lesson Plan

The lesson plan is the most particular thing required. It should be a CSV file where the rows are class resources, and the columns are specific metadata about that resource. The required columns are:

1. week, the week of the class the resource will be used
2. date, the date of the class the resource will be used
3. topic, a short description of the topic of the resource
4. reference, the bibtex ID for this resource
5. chapter, the chapter number of the resource being used
6. page_start, the first pdf page numbered page students should read
7. page_end, the last pdf page numbered page students should read

None values are permitted in the chapter, page_start, and page_end columns, but nowhere else. A missing value in page_start will be filled with 0, while a missing value in page_end will be filled with the last page of the resource. Thus, the following entry:

Week	Date	Topic	Reference	Chapter	page_start	page_end
1	4-Oct	Consumption, Savings, Balance of Payments	GLS	None	None	None

Would assign the entire "GLS" reference for students. This can be mixed-and-matched; see the example in materials/lesson_plan.csv for a full example

Reference to File mapping

Another file you need to provide is a mapping from bibtex reference IDs to PDF filenames. This should be a sample YAML file. Here is the mapping from the example in materials/ref_to_file.yaml:

GLS: GLS_Inter...
U: uribe-notes.pdf
S1: rbc_notes...
S2: stylized_...
SE: rbc_exten...

The ... is a flag for the script to auto-complete. You only need to provide as much of the PDF as is necessary to get a unique match, but you can also provide the entire filename if you like.

Bibtex

The required bibtex is a normal bibtex object. The only requirements are that:

1. All IDs declared in the bibtex file are used in the lesson plan
2. No unused bibtex entries are present