PreTeXtBook
Feature request: additional layout control for divisional exercises
As initially discussed on pretext-support, organization of divisional exercises into columns is currently only possible within an exercisegroup.
In some cases a publisher may want to use a multi column layout for the entire set of divisional exercises.
This would require adding a new attribute for the <exercises> division, as well as additional work on CSS and LaTeX.
One lower-cost way to accomplish this with existing infrastructure could be to tweak exercisegroup a bit: if it were possible to control whether or not the "Exercise group:" heading appears in the publisher file, and if the introduction were optional (I'm not sure if it is now), any subset of the exercises division could be wrapped in an exercise group that applies the multiple column layout.
I think, many years ago, we may have missed the mark with how we mark up multicolumn for this-or-that. It's a layout consideration with (99.99% of the time) no impact on the meaning of the content. And so clearly in the publisher's realm, not the author's. And I think it is clear that with the same book, you might want multicolumns one one format and not want it in another. They could even be closely related formats, like print for A4 vs print for letter. To be fair, we did not have publisher files way back then.
Somewhere else I proposed a certain publisher file setting that would be a space-separated list of xml:ids (this was for declaring a pagebreak location in print). I now wonder if the @cols for an exercisegroup should have been done this way (with hindsight). And then, relevant to this feature request, if exercises should be handled that way with a publisher file setting. This is contrary to:
This would require adding a new attribute for the
division, as well as additional work on CSS and LaTeX.
Because no new attribute in source, and probably we would only need to do this for LaTeX and satisfy 99.99% of the demand for this feature.
What is your expectation for a multicolumn exercises that has a multicolumn exercisegroup inside it? Assuming a complete move to the publisher file for controlling thees things, my expectation would be that you really would see a 2-column thing within one column of a larger two-column thing. And if you don't like it, change the declared ids in the publisher file.
I think I would not want a two column exercise group if the exercises overall were in two columns.
And yes, this would be mostly for PDF.
The motivation for this is the "Terms and Concepts" in APEX. These are a subexercises, not an exercise group, but Greg would like them to be in two columns.
I'd like to discuss (but not on this issue) the plan to use a file with xml:ids to control certain things in the publisher file to see if it's feasible for dealing with some of the (considerable) work I currently have to do to prepare the LaTeX file.