Thanks to a recent PreTeXt development, all Preview Activities and Activities in both ACS2e and APC can be printed in PDF directly from the HTML version.
For example, if you look at Activity 1.5.2 in ACS2e, you’ll see a printer icon:
If you click the printer icon, you’ll see a preview of the PDF of the activity:
And finally, if you hit the print icon once more, you’ll see a dialog box with your printer, including the option to save the file as PDF:
If you only use a small number of activities from ACS2e or APC, this is a good way to make a few handouts for class. If you regularly use the activities, I think it’s more efficient to have your students use a print copy of the full workbook, which you can download in PDF from the landing page for each course (the direct links are ACS2e WB1-4, ACS2e WB5-8, APC WB).
The big advantage of this new worksheet environment in PreTeXt is that it provides space for students to work after each prompt, space that should be commensurate with the task. I wrote a bit about this a year ago when we used this feature to update the PDF workbooks; the 2e HTML is the first time we’ve had this in the HTML version as well. If you are interested in more of the technical details in how PreTeXt generates these worksheets and what’s possible, see this recent post by Oscar Levin.
Big thanks to Oscar for all of his technical work to make these worksheets function well in the HTML, as well as to Rob Beezer for supporting them in PreTeXt and doing the coding work to include them based on feedback from others. Worksheets are primarily an outcome of the 2024 AIM workshop at Franciscan University of Steubenville on PreTeXt for Small Documents, and many of the participants there contributed ideas that led to this feature.
