Section 3 Why PTX?
Subsection 3.1 Why use PTX – technology
There are three pieces of technology which make PTX an ideal authoring tool for mathematics. Two will not surprise you, but perhaps the third will.
With the internet now ubiquitous, we want a tool which allows full use of its powers (without giving up on print).
Computation is becoming more and more machine-driven and done, so we want to fully support this within the text – both for the math and for checking homework.
Most likely, you are a mathematician, not a design professional nor a typesetting or cross-platform UI expert. Your authoring tool should take care of this for you, as much as possible.
The most important takeaway from this is that PTX allows you to separate content from presentation. Repeat this after me!
More useful features:
PTX fully incorporates traditional book publishing conventions, such as front matter, appendices, copyright information, and so forth, in the usual places. And it uses standard design conventions that have stood the test of time.
It allows print, online, Jupyter worksheet, and many other output types with just one source.
It takes care of most accessibility issues, and many character sets, for you.
It uses the standard MathJax to process online math.
It heavily uses Harald Schilly's wonderful knowls. This is easier to demonstrate than to define.
Theorem 3.1. My theorem.
The Riemann Hypothesis is true.
Proof.
Left to the reader.
Subsection 3.2 Why use PTX – freedom
PreTeXt is important for another reason – freedom. Here are some of the freedoms that PTX gives us, as textbook authors or consumers.
If you use a PTX book, you may free yourself from the relentless upgrade cycle of commercial publishers. Here is the estimate of student savings (around $100,000) from one text which has just converted to PTX. Naturally, there are also savings in terms of annoyance of trying to find older editions so your syllabi aren't constantly changing …
If you write a PTX book, you are free to write the mathematics, not focus on distribution. How many free textbooks start but never make it further than the first stage?
PTX allows you to make the best use of free tools like Sage! And also WeBWorK, LaTeX, and many others.
PTX is also developed as open source, so if you are motivated to make a change, you can!
Perhaps most importantly, PTX supports your ability to free your text from yourself. For now, many of us wish to retain creative control; but what happens upon retirement, changing institutions, etc.? Because the source for your text is in clear, structured files, you can allow others to submit change requests. Here is a non-PTX example of a highly-regarded text accepting such requests.
Whether you choose a restrictive license from Creative Commons keeping full control, or go all the way to allowing total remixing with a GPL or even public domain license, having the source in this form makes things easy to collaborate.