History of Biology Teaching Materials

Charles H. Pence, Université catholique de Louvain

This is the source material used to generate the history of biology teaching lessons that form something of a companion to my book, A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic.

Code Features

I tossed this code here because it does some pretty fancy stuff in terms of building a single Markdown file into a variety of interesting output formats. It relies in part on my personal LaTeX article class, which you can find in my dotfiles repository, but it’s primarily is just setting things like fonts and microtype optimizations in this instance, and you could readily remove the reference to cparticle and replace it by further configuration in snippet.tex.

A Pandoc Lua filter is building special environments around quotations from primary sources and “box” material for the “THINK” questions found in the text. It’s also preparing special-classed images that are flowed in-text in LaTeX using the wrapfig package.

The build script adds via sed some TeX inputs, which set paper size and margins (building in both A4 and US Letter), and configure color vs. black-and-white output options. It also adds the snippet.tex file, which contains the definitions of the environments for the fancy quotes and boxes.

License

The teaching materials themselves (i.e., the Markdown files named Vignette.md in subdirectories here) are released under CC-BY 4.0. Images (present in the Images folder under the subdirectory for each lesson) have individual licensing terms, which are detailed in the image captions in each Markdown file (the majority are public domain). All remaining code/scripts/TeX here are released as public domain under CC0.

This material was prepared in part with funding from the US National Science Foundation, under HPS Scholars Award #1826784.