Ximera content consists of two distinct types of LaTeX files. Those with the xourse document class and those with the ximera document class. Files with the xourse document class glue together Ximera content via the commands \activity and \practice. Ximera content is written using the ximera document class. The basic structure of a Ximera activity is as follows:

\documentclass{ximera}
\begin{document}
%%
%% Content goes here
%%
\end{document}

A Ximera activity may be a single problem, a list of exercises, a review of a concept, a section of a book—you are only limited by your imagination. Examples of individual Ximera activities can be found here:

Single problem

See:

https://ximera.osu.edu/mooculus/limitLaws/exercises/exerciseList/limitLaws/exercises/limitLaw2

List of exercises

See:

https://ximera.osu.edu/mooculus/limitLaws/exercises/exerciseList/limitLaws/exercises/limitLaw7

Review of concept

See:

https://xronos.clas.ufl.edu/mac1140nowell/PrecalculusXourse/explorePolynomials/Practice/factoringGeneral-Practice1

Section of book

See:

https://ximera.osu.edu/mooculus/calculus1/limitLaws/digInLimitLaws

You can see the source code for any of the activities above by appending .tex to the URL.

1 Tips for Ximera activities

We wish to write Ximera documents as simply as possible. Here are some tips.

Give them descriptive file names so that someone can figure out what file they are looking at. File names like problem1.tex are usually less helpful than say, basicDerivativePractice1.tex. In particular, all document names used for Ximera must be web-safe! This means they:

Must end with .tex

as our compiler will not attempt to compile non-TeX documents.

Must only use alphanumeric English characters

Meaning: a,b, …, z, A,B, …, Z, 0,1, …, 9, and hyphen ‘-’ and underscore ‘_’ though the last two are discouraged.

Cannot use any other characters, including spaces

This means all Ximera document names must be a single word.

This is not a limitation of Ximera, rather it is a rule that nearly all web-accessible documents must follow.

Use basic LaTeX environments and commands like: enumerate, itemize, description, align*, $...$, \[...\], and so on. Macros made of basic LaTeX commands are fine as long as you store them in xmPreamble.tex or another file on your input path. This helps keep the headers very clean.

Avoid manual formatting. At the core of the Ximera philosophy is the principle of separating content from deployment. This means that the intellectual substance—the ideas, explanations, and activities—should remain independent of the specific presentation or layout in which they are delivered. This separation ensures adaptability, longevity, and accessibility, enabling content to evolve without being constrained by the limitations of any particular delivery method.

With that said, our strategies for creating PDFs are to load a separate style file at the level of a xourse file. Further formatting can be achieved via the command \pdfOnly.

Special Ximera documents and folders are automatically loaded by all files in the repository (assuming they are no more than three folders deep).

xmPreamble.tex

This is a place to put custom commands to help your document compile. It is not intended to be used for cosmetic changes to Ximera. For making pretty documents, we load a separate preamble (usually called a print style) protected by the command \pdfOnly.

xmPictures/

This is a folder that you can place JPGs, PNGs, and PDFs, for inclusion into Ximera documents.

If you use ∖maketitle, please ensure you have a title and an abstract. Something like this will suffice:

\documentclass{ximera}
\title{My groovy activity}
\begin{document}
\begin{abstract}
    A really fun math activity!
\end{abstract}
\maketitle

\end{document}