Prusa Mendel Visual Instructions: LaTeX version
I have nearly finished converting Gary Hodgson’s wonderful visual instructions for assembling a Prusa Mendel to LaTeX. I was going to wait to publish this until after ironing out all the style problems, but since Prusa just released his upgrade to the printer today and an update to the guide is imminent, I figured this post was in order.
You may ask “Why LaTeX? What’s wrong with the current format?” There are a number of very good reasons why a collaborative guide should not be written in the Microsoft Publisher format:
- Microsoft Publisher saves documents as large binary files, which don’t work well with version control systems. LaTeX files are pure text, which enables version control systems to show differences between versions in a coherent way and also to store only the differences between versions rather than the entire file, which saves a lot of space.
- Microsoft Publisher saves documents in a proprietary format that no other program can read or write. Therefore, anyone who wants to edit one of these documents has no choice over which program he/she uses to do so. By contrast, since LaTeX is plain text it can be edited with any of the vast number of text editors out there.
- LaTeX does a great job of separating content from style, a model that has worked out very nicely for HTML/CSS. What does this mean? It means that when you want to add content to your document you won’t end up spending hours mucking about fiddling with margins and line-spacing.
- LaTeX makes it easy to split up the document by sections, allowing one to use a separate file for each section. This enhances collaboration by making it easier for multiple people to work on different parts of the document at the same time. Moreover, all the images used in the file can be edited independently by those who don’t want to “get their hands dirty” with LaTeX.
- Adding a table of contents and an index are one line operations.
If you are interested, please take a peek at my github fork of the project. It is a bit tricky to get your build environment set up correctly, but you don’t need to build it to contribute copy/graphics changes. I think if we all work together this can become a much bigger thing: a Prusa Mendel Assembly/Maintenance/Usage guide, rather than just assembly.
