Compile a Chirun Course Package

Chirun supports compiling multiple documents (forming a Chirun “course package”) into a single output website. The source files are compiled into separate HTML pages and hyperlinked together.

Compiling a course package is very similar to the building a stanalone item. The file config.yml controls the structure and appearance of the Chirun course items.

Create config.yml with multiple items

Extra documents can be included by populating the structure section of the config.yml file.

As an example, the following configuration file instructs Chirun to build two items of type chapter. An index page hyperlinking the items together will be included as part of the HTML output.

author: 'Ann Example'
title: 'Example Course'
structure:
  - type: chapter
    source: item_one.tex
    title: 'Item One'
  - type: chapter
    source: item_two.tex
    title: 'Item Two'
build_pdf: True

Save the above example in a file named config.yml. Then, in the same directory, add two documents to be included as part of the output produced Chirun. Finally, update the document titles and source filenames in config.yml to match your documents and the course package is ready to be built using Chirun.

Warning

When building a course package consisting of multiple source files Chirun uses the creation and modification dates of the input and output files to decide whether to (re-)compile a certain item. When compiling a course that has already been compiled before, only items where the source file was modified after the previous run of chirun will be compiled.

This can cause issues when editing indirectly included files, such as images not directly listed as the source in config.yml, or when editing source filenames to point to files with older modification dates. Such problems can usually be solved by modifying the named source file in some way, so that the modification date is later.

On Linux and macOS, this can be done with a single command that updates the modification date without changing the content of the file:

touch example_item.tex

The Sample Course

A full sample course is provided as a demonstration of how to build a Chirun course package and populate the config.yml file with items of various types. The following instructions describe how to obtain and build the sample course.

• Use git to obtain a copy of the sample course package:

  git clone https://github.com/chirun-ncl/sample_course.git
  

• Change into the directory and run chirun to build the sample course.

• The HTML output will be in the build directory.