learnlatex.org

CONTRIBUTING

Contributing to learnlatex.org

Thanks for considering contributing to learnlatex.org: feedback, fixes and ideas are all useful.

ChangeLog, commit messages and authors

Please note any significant change to the content of questions in CHANGELOG.md, including which lesson is changed in the format L-<number>.

Commit messages where the content of a single lesson is changed should start with L-<name>. Changes to the content of lessons should always be made in separate commits: formatting, typos or other ‘non-significant’ changes can be made for multiple lessons in one go.

If you are making a significant change to the content, please make sure you add yourself to the contributors list.

Formatting

The site is written in GitHub-flavoured Markdown, and uses the GitHub Pages system to convert this to web pages. In general, Markdown is easy to use, and offers enough formatting power to make the site useful. There are a few things to watch out for

• The Jekyll ‘back-end’ used by GitHub Pages is somewhat picky about unbalanced braces ({ and }), even in code blocks. That’s because it is looking for some instructions of its own there. To turn this off, surround the relevant parts of your source with

  <!-- {% raw %} -->

  and

  <!-- {% endraw %} -->

  (Typically these will go just before and after the ``` lines.)

• Only use block quotes for real quotations: use code markup for terminal output and similar

• We use the following HTML entities for special characters:
  • … Ellipsis
  • — Em-dash
  • – En-dash
  •   Non-breaking space

• quotes you can use ASCII double and single quotes, which will be changed to typographical quotes: "abc" 'abc' abc's produces “abc” ‘abc’ abc’s.

• Please wrap source lines to keep them below 80 characters long

Language

At present, we have full content only in English, but the longer-term plan is to add additional languages: notice that the content is within a /en/ tree. There are sample translations under de, fr and pt but only the page titles are translated until the English version is more stable.

For the avoidance of doubt, we are using US English spelling (and idiom) on the site, as this is the most widely-understood approach.

If you do plan to contribute a translation then please contact the site maintainers by opening an issue.

The lessons lesson-1–15 and extended lessons more-1–15 should be translated fairly closely. Additional lessons language-* may be added that need not be translations of the English text, but have information specific to the language being used.

The translation should be placed in a two-letter directory using the ISO 639-1 language code. The yml langs array in _config.yml will need to be extended to include the language.

See also the specific guidelines for translators.