[Biopython-dev] Daily builds of the Tutorial (PDF and HTML)

Peter biopython at maubp.freeserve.co.uk
Fri Mar 12 13:22:55 UTC 2010


Hi all,

Back in November I set up a simple pair of cron jobs to update the code
snapshot on http://biopython.open-bio.org/SRC/biopython/ every hour:
http://lists.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython-dev/2009-November/007002.html

I've just added another job which takes the latest Tutorial.tex file and
compiles it with pdflatex (already installed) and hevea (installed from
source under my user account) to make the PDF and HTML files.
These are then copied to the webserver and published as:

http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial-dev.html
http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial-dev.pdf

These are currently updated once a day (at 2:40am which shouldn't
be too busy whichever USA timezone the server uses). Assuming
I got my crontab settings right - in the short term I'll keep an eye on
it to check ;)

In comparison the "official" versions at the following URLs are
generally updated only for releases:

http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html
http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.pdf

I know that not everyone has latex or hevea installed (installing
hevea from source is a bit of a hassle even on Linux), and further
more proof reading the raw markup in Tutorial.tex isn't that easy.

So, the point of all this effort is now anyone can help proofread
the latest version of the tutorial - this should also be of use to
those users/contributors actually running the latest code from
git rather than the official releases.

Regards,

Peter



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