Creating a clean presentation style in 40 commits

Posted on January 13, 2013

Did you always want to learn ConTeXt, but did not know where to start? I have written a git-based tutorial that should help you get started.

NOTE: The automatically generated output of this tutorial is now available as a separate post

The idea of the tutorial is to start with an empty document, and add features one-by-one. Each git commit corresponds to one small change in the document, and includes pointers to the documentation corresponding to that change. Use this tutorial as follows:

  1. Clone the git repository:

     git clone git://github.com/adityam/context-slides-example.git
     cd context-slides-example
    
  2. Get git-walk (requires ruby)

     wget https://raw.github.com/augustl/binbin/master/git-walk
     chmod +x git-walk
    
  3. Checkout the first commit

     git checkout init
    
  4. Open the two files, slides.tex and example.tex in the editor.

  5. Read the log message, compile example.tex and view the result.

     git log -n 1
     context example.tex
     evince example.pdf &
    
  6. Go to next commit and repeat step 5. (This requires git-walk to be in your $PATH.

     git walk next
    

(Alternatively, instead of using git-walk, you can use a GUI tool to incrementally checkout the commits one by one, compile example.tex at each step, and view the result).


This entry was posted in Design and tagged git, presentation, tutorial.